The world according to Andrew

Well we didn’t see this coming did we? HP have announced that they are going to be (retiring) releasing the Palm WebOS into the Open Source community. The detail of this announcement however is still unclear, for example, how will the patents be managed, what bit’s will be included in the open source package and which won’t? It’s all a little vague.

I really liked WebOS. On the whole it was clean and architecturally a reasonable departure from the norm. It had some nice UI touches too. Problem was nobody made anything for the 7 or so Palm WebOS users. Oh and the handsets were slow and ugly to boot.

I don’t really see things changing much with this announcement. Open Source projects rarely flourish when it comes to coherent design and normally suffer badly from design by committee. If you open your house to everyone it won’t take long for some idiot to trash it and I fear this is the way WebOS is heading. At the end of the day when you open source a mobile operating system you don’t end up with a world class Apple beating mobile operating system. You end up with an open source operating system – or even worse 100 slightly different but mostly the same (fragmented) operating systems. No vendor in their right mind would select that!