Open webOS Beta Officially Released

http://blog.openwebosproject.org/post/30593510898/open-webos-august-edition

by mikecane • 14 years ago

137 25 14 years ago

blog.openwebosproject.org

wgirish• 14 years ago

Will it run on HP Touchpad ?

darklajid• 14 years ago

The article specifically points to the webos-ports project for that. There you can follow the 'webOS - Community Edition for the Touchpad' project.

mikecane2• 14 years ago

And we'll need the Community to port that fantastic LunaCE to Open webOS.

mitjak• 14 years ago

Will definitely keep my ears open for further announcements. As much as I avoid webOS due to the lack of quality apps, booting into it even for a short while causes me to realize just how smooth its UX is and how awkward and backwards in a lot of ways the other mobile OSs are.

trun• 14 years ago

Totally agree. I can't tell you how many times I tried to close apps on my android phone by swiping upwards after I started using WebOS.

grantjgordon• 14 years ago

Way to go! Web OS always had such promise -- I hope that it can make a bigger impact now that it's been freed from the shackles of the dying Palm.

mikecane2• 14 years ago

Waiting for someone to port this to the Nexus 7...

iscrewyou• 14 years ago

Question: Does this openness also include the things that WebOS was amazing at? Like Swipe Up to close, card stacks, etc?

Is, say Google, allowed to use that without paying royalties? Or does HP still own those software patents?

tomkit• 14 years ago

It depends on the exact open source license they release it under. I googled around and all I could find was that they would release it under "an open source license".

hackernews• 14 years ago

From the post:

"The Beta release is comprised of 54 webOS components available as opensource. This brings over 450,000 lines of code released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community."

unwiredben2• 14 years ago

all of the code that HP/Palm originally developed is under Apache 2.0. There may be parts like our customized build of Qt that are under other licenses.

commandar• 14 years ago

Android has slowly been lifting ideas from WebOS since Matias Duarte took over as head of UX design.

I don't know that we'll ever see card stacks and the like in Android, but many of the best UI changes in Android 4.0+ have been ideas that Duarte brought with him. The way Android handles notifications now would be a pretty good example.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

> I don't know that we'll ever see card stacks and the like in Android

I think ICS's Recent Apps view and Chrome's card-like tab switching show that Google is (cautiously?) approaching a card stack UI.

neya• 14 years ago

Wow..this is seriously good news...can't wait to see open Source software like this prosper...hopefully no one will sue them, though..

kevincennis• 14 years ago

WebOS would have been so awesome if Palm had put it on nicer hardware and found a way to get developers on-board.

agumonkey• 14 years ago

In an interview the lead said there was a shortage of parts, nothing else was available.

programminggeek• 14 years ago

One interview basically said Apple had bought out all the parts that they wanted to use and HP is/was unwilling to invest in the product enough to get the parts that would be good enough to be competitive.

The same thing happened in the iPod/mp3 player market. Hard to compete when it takes tens or hundreds of millions of dollars up front just to secure parts to be on par with Apple, let alone trying to get ahead.

Most big company management just doesn't want to invest that kind of money to compete with an established winner like the iPad. Samsung is about the only company who can afford to do it and that's largely because Apple is in effect subsidizing Samsung's production costs by buying so many Samsung parts.

wtracy• 14 years ago

The announcement mentions in passing a client-server model that allows the UI to handle things like touch interaction without blocking on app code.

Can anyone elaborate on how this actually works? I would expect the UI rendering and Javascript execution to be all happening in one WebKit process. I would be excited to learn if the webOS team has come up with something I don't know about here.

unwiredben2• 14 years ago

Since version 2, webOS has supported application-bundled node.js services. An application can spin up those service processes and have them handle communications with external servers and doing data processing, with communication handled over the Luna Service Bus, a on-device transport that allows both simple request-response or subscriptions for JSON-formatted data.

macco• 14 years ago

Great to have a real free os for mobiles. I am very thrilled what people will do with it.

Open webOS Beta Officially Released

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