I’m kind of skeptical towards the announcement by HP today that they are going to contribute the WebOS platform to the Free Open Source Software community. As a former owner of a HP WebOS device I’m still a bit disgruntled in a sense to how they treated their customers and never really made it right and better yet I was shocked to see HP layoff quite a good amount off their really talented employees who work with FOSS when they train-wrecked WebOS.
I’m not sure that I agree with HP’s CEO Meg Whitman when she says that WebOS is the only platform built from the ground up to be “mobile, cloud-connected and scalable” because if it is such a great platform why did it fail so hard? Personally I think in the end it was a token gesture at best when their efforts to sell the platform fell short.
Hopefully WebOS will benefit someone in the FOSS community but with the news of Ubuntu getting into mobile devices and TV’s in the future I think WebOS is going to be nothing more than some abandonware that happened to get open sourced.
I guess I’m just wondering what license it will be released under? Perhaps the Chicken Dance License?