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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
"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."
IANAL, but (1) I would assume that cynically including some unneeded code would not suddenly grant protection for all the rest of your code, and (2) the protection applies to the part of the program actually using the Apache licensed code that was adopted, so it would need to be an integral part of the relevant component. For example if there is a patent on a video codec, the code would need to be in the video codec handling code.
And again, IANAL, but I assume the implication is that you can't just grab some code and stick it alongside your app for protection. You are only protected if you actually used the license-giving code in your app in the intended way. So this would not help Android, which does not build upon WebOS.
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.
