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webOS open-sourced to death

So HP open-sources webOS. That may sound like good news, but I doubt it.

• This is HP’s last resort. Apparently no one was interested in buying or licensing webOS.
• No word as to whether the webOS UX, by far the most interesting part of the project, is also open source now.
• What does “Good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation” mean. Whose governance? HP’s or the open source project’s? And if you require UX layers and device capabilities device vendors will be less interested in the platform because they can’t do whatever they want.
• No word on who will create webOS devices. Without a device vendor backing you up your platform is irrelevant. Bryan Rieger suggested Huawei or ZTE. Good luck with avoiding fragmentation.
• The webOS browser is not very good, and I haven’t seen any notable improvements in the last ... I don’t know, year or so. For a web-based platform that’s pretty damning.
• Several people said they’d like to marry webOS to Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko, which tries to do more or less the same. If Mozilla can get the UI, brilliant. But otherwise I don’t see much point in a marriage.

And the legalese BS is longer than the press release itself.

Update: a little more news on the timeframe. They’re going to open-source in stages, and may have to replace some licensed parts. That makes sense. Which means they’re going to open up the frigging framework first.

Who gives a shit about yet another framework? What mobile players have to learn really soon is that the framework wars are over and jQuery has won. No more fucking frameworks.

Oh, and also remember that while it might be true that Samsung, HTC, and the other post-Android vendors are interested in webOS as an alternative to Android, they did not buy or license it! Why not? Because it’s not good enough? Or because HP’s price was too high? A lot depends on that.