12th December 2011
HP has announced that webOS will now be made available to the open source community, ending months of speculation about what the company planned to do with the troubled operating system. The decision follows HP’s dropping of key hardware attached to webOS earlier this year, and is one that analyst Avi Greengart has stated is the equivalent of an “honourable death sentence”.
The hardware giants announced the news of webOS’s fate on Friday evening, with a press release stating:
“webOS offers a number of benefits to the entire ecosystem of web applications. For developers, applications can be easily built using standard web technologies. In addition, its single integrated stack offers multiplatform portability. For device manufacturers, it provides a single web-centric platform to run across multiple devices. As a result, the end user benefits from a fast, immersive user experience.”
Meg Whitman, the company’s much-quoted new CEO and President, also added:
“webOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable. By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices.”
However, the news has led to some mixed reaction among the globe’s top IT analysts and journalists. And one of the most damning responses so far has been that of Current Analysis’s Avi Greengart:
“This is a death sentence but an honorable death sentence,” he told IT World Canada.
“HP is saying, 'We're washing our hands of this, but making it available for anyone to play with as they see fit… if you were really looking to go out and build an ecosystem around your product, this probably isn't the one with the greatest traction," he added.
Despite some further negativity from other IT analysts, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan was less damning of the decision in his report, suggesting the move could actually prove to be a bold one:
“In some respects, the WebOS move is savvy. HP, which probably could have sold the OS for something, decided that WebOS could attract developers as an open source project. And given that Apple’s iOS and Android dominate the smartphone landscape, the WebOS bet makes sense. Smartphone carriers will need some kind of hedge. By open sourcing WebOS, HP could find a following for the mobile platform.”
And perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of the news could yet be those who bought webOS hardware such as the TouchPad tablet. Having previously been told HP was ceasing production of the product after just 49 days on the shelf, owners of TouchPads were facing up to the likelihood of no further developments being added to their exiled new toy.
Yet open sourcing its operating system could lead to demand for new TouchPad updates pushing developers into making new improvements to webOS, something ZDNet’s Jason Perlow believes integral to the hardware’s performance:
“With these 3rd-party patches and hacks, it actually makes the TouchPad comparable in performance to an iPad 2 or an Android 3.2-based tablet, which alleviates many of the problems that reviewers and users have experienced with the product since it has launched,” he said, in relation to TouchPad hacks made prior to webOS’s open sourcing.
“By fully Open Sourcing WebOS, and licensing their software in a proper, controlled manner and setting appropriate guidelines for community contributions and integrating that code into their products, Hewlett-Packard can set an example for even companies like Google which are floundering with their own attempts at maintaining order with their respective platforms.”
With webOS’s fate officially determined, HP will now focus on reigniting its PC division, after Meg Whitman overturned a previous decision to scrap it, and its development of cloud computing infrastructure and software provision, through the company’s acquisition of Autonomy.
The company did, however, commit to helping with the open source project, stating it would “be an active participant and investor in the project” and that its engineers would “deliver on-going enhancements and new versions into the marketplace”.
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