

Open webOS Beta Officially Released - mikecane
http://blog.openwebosproject.org/post/30593510898/open-webos-august-edition

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mitjak
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.

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trun
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.

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grantjgordon
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.

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

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

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iscrewyou
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?

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tomkit
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".

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hackernews
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."

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Danieru
That is good news, Apache 2.0 does in fact have a patent grant. It also
happens to be Goolge's favourite license.

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azakai
The patent grant is only for those using the code. So it wouldn't help Google
unless Google rebuilt Android on WebOS.

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rbanffy
How much code is enough to be covered?

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azakai
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.

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wtracy
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.

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unwiredben
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.

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

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wgirish
Will it run on HP Touchpad ?

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

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

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

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

