Well, it appears that HP has finally made a decision regarding the future of WebOS. As mentioned in the article (http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/1...ce-much-of-it/), HP will be keeping WebOS, but making it open-source, while still being the watchdog over all the alterations done to the OS.

Sounds like great news! Hopefully, we will see more WebOS - powered devices in the future.

I have a soft spot for WebOS; to me it always felt like a true successor to Maemo 5. I have bought a HP Veer for my girlfriend some time ago, and she absolutely loves it. WebOS feels very intuitive, even I play around with it from time to time.

Add a proper GUI toolkit (Qt, EFL, well even GTK) + Python support and I'm in.

Owning a HP Pre 3, I must say that I love the OS, not the fragile hardware.. (sent back for repair at the moment)

Some essentials like SIP and others are missing but the user experience of WebOS is the closest thing to Maemo 5 to date.

The HP hardware platform is can't touch Nokia's finish.

Let's see what's going to be left in the open source WebOS once the 3rd party pattens have been weeded out.
Hopefully it may be ported to all that nice hardware previously wasted to Android.

Add a proper media framework (gstreamer is there but crippled) and so on. Provide service plugins (there are none in the catalogue). Provide some messaging plugins. Get Opera or someone else to integrate a _serious_ browser, not that even-less-than-basic shite that's currently there (the "advanced" sucks too) And so on.

To me, it doesn't feel or operates in the slightest like a Maemo "successor." If Tizen will look like webOS (scripted GUI and HTML "apps"), good night.

I don't think their community will bring much refinement, for several months now i have the feel they are limited in what they are able to do, what they focus on, and what they want and don't want. It looks almost they are more interested in selling their home-brew apps at some point, and fixing/advancing the OS, and promoting/using open standards instead of focusing on building self-contained "you can but only within _MY_ app" apps, feels like evil communism to them.

I mean, all the open-source packages are provided for how long now on opensource.palm.com? But not much exists, that they were used for by said developers.

Disclaimer: i own an 32GB US TouchPad, and the scene is nothing compared to Maemo/Debian et al.

Yeap webOS is nowhere near to what maemo was but at least it is a considerable choice for the future unlike android,ios and windows phail

I never used WebOS, but can't you just install 'normal' Linux stuff, such as Pidgin, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc?

There's optware, where some (console) stuff is available. We speak in terms of about 10 packages, by the way. And: as there's no Gtk+ or Qt or EFL or whatever, nothing else is there. And nobody ported GUI-based stuff to Mojo or Enyo (their Javascript/XML based application framework). There's xterm and an xserver, but they both suck a bit.

All you have is Debian Squeeze, Ubuntu, or Alarm in a chroot environment. Don't even remind me about the issue that the vkb cannot be hidden under Debian chroot and cuts quite some space from the virtual screen there, as it has it's exclusive space...

As i said, it seems nobody cared to do something with the source+patches provided on opensource.palm.com, other than the kernels.

If archlinux went natively, could possibly with webos drivers native fremantle run on veer?

How about porting WebOS to N900? Anyone interested in that?

I'd be down with that!