How HP and Open Source Can Save WebOS 86
snydeq writes "If HP wants a future for struggling WebOS, it must invest in the platform, not abandon it, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'It seems HP may only be truly committed to the platform if it can offload the cost of developing and maintaining it. Yet if that's what HP hopes to achieve by opening the WebOS source, it's bound to be disappointed.' Instead, HP should dedicate its own developer resources and 'release as much code as possible under an Apache, BSD, or similarly permissive license. Dual licensing under the GPL might leave HP with more opportunities to monetize the platform, but it won't garner as much interest from hardware makers, who are what WebOS needs most.'"
Re:Time versus money (Score:4, Informative)
The question is does that commercial backing undermine you (e.g. like OS/X undermined FreeBSD)
How do you think OS X undermined FreeBSD? Apple hired quite a few FreeBSD developers to work on Darwin, but they still contribute stuff back. And things like libdispatch and libc++ that are initially developed on Darwin typically get FreeBSD ports before they run on any other non-Darwin platforms because of the similarities in the libc and kernel interfaces (e.g. libdispatch on FreeBSD just required some #ifdefs around the Mach-port stuff, on Linux it requires you to use libkqueue to emulate some *BSD kernel APIs).