This is why it still confuses me to this day that the hacker/computer literate community put their backing in Android instead of WebOS. Sure Android was released sooner (but not sooner-enough to have insurmountable traction), but the Palm Pre actually allowed for booting a kernel over USB and gave root access by typing in the Konami code. The Touchpad allows for running of Debian, quite well!
WebOS had no chance to succeed because the community it catered to chose the Google name and unfulfilled promises over actual freedom.
Android has an active hacker community because you can grab the code from git and build a working Android system.
This is exactly what the CyanogenMod team does; Steve Kondik has even started referring to CM as an Android distribution ala Debian as opposed to a simple set of mods or patches.
As much as I love WebOS, that just plain isn't possible with that platform.
(this was posted from WebOS on a Touchpad that also has Android installed as dual boot. Care to show me the Android devices that have been hacked to run WebOS?)
But you don't need to fork your own distribution from source to change everything about WebOS. New kernels and new environments are common, even before it became open source. The only thing closed source was the Luna desktop environment.
I fail to see how your last point proves anything, all points considered.
It's impossible to do anything similar with WebOS right now.
>I fail to see how your last point proves anything, all points considered.
The kind of people that care about being able to hack on a system want full access to the system. Android provides that. The fact that Android is running on devices that the manufacturers of those devices never intended to run Android proves it.
People that want open devices will generally prefer open software. There's absolutely nothing befuddling about that.
The kind of people that care about being able to hack on a system want full access to the system. Android provides that. The fact that Android is running on devices that the manufacturers of those devices never intended to run Android proves it.
The kind of people that care about being able to hack on a system should care that their device was designed to be hacked on and isn't going to force them to break it. Palm/HP hardware provides that. The fact that Debian/Ubuntu runs with very little modification and Android runs quite readily proves it.
WebOS never realized its full potential due to market forces, but the fact that the hardware still stands and is so easily hackable is a testament to the hardware design. It strikes me as odd that people are so willing to defend Android, in all its general customer unfriendliness at the hands of carriers/manufacturers, but since it's "open source", they're willing to overlook closed hardware and locked bootloaders. The Pre was (more) open hardware with a (mostly) open system, rooted by default with no carrier lockdowns.
Palm even gave directions on their website on how to launch a new kernel, and supported a side-loading market for kernel modifications. And they gave directions on how to unbrick your device should the new kernel fail. Is that not hacker-friendly enough?
You're focusing on hardware when everyone else is talking about software. The point is that Android can be made to run on arbitrary hardware because it's open.
> but since it's "open source",
Explain the use of scare quotes. Android is, by every reasonable definition, open source software.
By any reasonable definition, Android as an operating system was more open than WebOS from day one. I can build a complete, working Android system and run Android applications on it if I want. You cannot do the same with WebOS.
>The Pre was (more) open hardware with a (mostly) open system, rooted by default with no carrier lockdowns.
Except you were locked into Palm (and only Palm) hardware by the license. The Android platform is completely portable; the WebOS platform is not.
I didn't intend for that to be scare quotes, I intended for it to sarcasm quotes. People hide behind the open source name even if open source means nothing. It doesn't matter if your OS is open source if your hardware can't be made to boot your newly-compiled version. WebOS, in my opinion, balances base-Linux with open (enough) hardware better than the Android phones with an open source system (except for 3.0) and completely closed hardware.
I'm not talking strictly hardware, though you may be talking strictly software. That may be where the disagreement is stemming from. The point of the article is about the locked bootloader restricting access to the hardware. I'm posing my opinion that Palm WebOS devices were more open than a good number of Android-based handsets, overall. With market support, WebOS could have been the open-iPhone. I put "open source" in sarcasm-quotes because the tradeoff is freedom of your hardware.
>I'm not talking strictly hardware, though you may be talking strictly software. That may be where the disagreement is stemming from. The point of the article is about the locked bootloader restricting access to the hardware.
The thing you're overlooking is that it's possible to run Android on hardware without these conditions. If you want a completely unlocked phone, there's the Nexus series in the mainstream and there are other devices that are relatively open on the hardware side as well.
The point is, you had the option of running Android on any hardware you liked. With WebOS, you had no option but Palm. That's the very definition of vendor lock-in.
Nobody particularly cared about being able to install Debian on the Pre, because Debian will run on any hardware you throw at it because Debian is open software and can be made to run on anything you want it to. It doesn't matter that locked down devices exist as long as open ones do, because the software will run on any device.
This is something that Android can do that WebOS couldn't.
ETA:
I think the tl;dr of this would be "Hardware is a commodity; software isn't."
Android provably can be made to work on phones which weren't even made with that in mind. This apparently didn't happen with webOS, which counters "you don't really need the source"—though hackers have a healthy disdain for that attitude even if it had been true.
WebOS is the standard Linux kernel with a new desktop environment. If you can get the Linux kernel running on a device, throw on a WebKit browser and you've got WebOS. That's how its so easy to get Debian/Ubuntu running on a Touchpad with a simple chroot.
WebOS aside, support the maker of (more) open hardware. Support the people who give you full control of your device by default (even if they didn't initially give you the source for their WM).
WebOS was on two very mediocre phones (if not at their release, then definitely years later when they were still the flagship devices) and wasn't open source.
WebOS was open source except for Luna, and the devices were okay midrange phones at launch. After the market snubbed them, Palm didn't have enough money to keep creating newer and better phones.
Comments
This is why it still confuses me to this day that the hacker/computer literate community put their backing in Android instead of WebOS. Sure Android was released sooner (but not sooner-enough to have insurmountable traction), but the Palm Pre actually allowed for booting a kernel over USB and gave root access by typing in the Konami code. The Touchpad allows for running of Debian, quite well!
WebOS had no chance to succeed because the community it catered to chose the Google name and unfulfilled promises over actual freedom.
Android has an active hacker community because you can grab the code from git and build a working Android system.
This is exactly what the CyanogenMod team does; Steve Kondik has even started referring to CM as an Android distribution ala Debian as opposed to a simple set of mods or patches.
As much as I love WebOS, that just plain isn't possible with that platform.
(this was posted from WebOS on a Touchpad that also has Android installed as dual boot. Care to show me the Android devices that have been hacked to run WebOS?)
But you don't need to fork your own distribution from source to change everything about WebOS. New kernels and new environments are common, even before it became open source. The only thing closed source was the Luna desktop environment.
I fail to see how your last point proves anything, all points considered.
>The only thing closed source was the Luna desktop environment.
So the only thing that was closed source was the part of the system that the user directly interacts with. Gotcha.
Andy Rubin's definition of open is the one that a lot of the hacker community can abide by:
https://twitter.com/#!/arubin/statuses/27808662429
It's impossible to do anything similar with WebOS right now.
>I fail to see how your last point proves anything, all points considered.
The kind of people that care about being able to hack on a system want full access to the system. Android provides that. The fact that Android is running on devices that the manufacturers of those devices never intended to run Android proves it.
People that want open devices will generally prefer open software. There's absolutely nothing befuddling about that.
WebOS never realized its full potential due to market forces, but the fact that the hardware still stands and is so easily hackable is a testament to the hardware design. It strikes me as odd that people are so willing to defend Android, in all its general customer unfriendliness at the hands of carriers/manufacturers, but since it's "open source", they're willing to overlook closed hardware and locked bootloaders. The Pre was (more) open hardware with a (mostly) open system, rooted by default with no carrier lockdowns.
Palm even gave directions on their website on how to launch a new kernel, and supported a side-loading market for kernel modifications. And they gave directions on how to unbrick your device should the new kernel fail. Is that not hacker-friendly enough?
>Is that not hacker-friendly enough?
You're focusing on hardware when everyone else is talking about software. The point is that Android can be made to run on arbitrary hardware because it's open.
> but since it's "open source",
Explain the use of scare quotes. Android is, by every reasonable definition, open source software.
By any reasonable definition, Android as an operating system was more open than WebOS from day one. I can build a complete, working Android system and run Android applications on it if I want. You cannot do the same with WebOS.
>The Pre was (more) open hardware with a (mostly) open system, rooted by default with no carrier lockdowns.
Except you were locked into Palm (and only Palm) hardware by the license. The Android platform is completely portable; the WebOS platform is not.
I didn't intend for that to be scare quotes, I intended for it to sarcasm quotes. People hide behind the open source name even if open source means nothing. It doesn't matter if your OS is open source if your hardware can't be made to boot your newly-compiled version. WebOS, in my opinion, balances base-Linux with open (enough) hardware better than the Android phones with an open source system (except for 3.0) and completely closed hardware.
I'm not talking strictly hardware, though you may be talking strictly software. That may be where the disagreement is stemming from. The point of the article is about the locked bootloader restricting access to the hardware. I'm posing my opinion that Palm WebOS devices were more open than a good number of Android-based handsets, overall. With market support, WebOS could have been the open-iPhone. I put "open source" in sarcasm-quotes because the tradeoff is freedom of your hardware.
>I'm not talking strictly hardware, though you may be talking strictly software. That may be where the disagreement is stemming from. The point of the article is about the locked bootloader restricting access to the hardware.
The thing you're overlooking is that it's possible to run Android on hardware without these conditions. If you want a completely unlocked phone, there's the Nexus series in the mainstream and there are other devices that are relatively open on the hardware side as well.
The point is, you had the option of running Android on any hardware you liked. With WebOS, you had no option but Palm. That's the very definition of vendor lock-in.
Nobody particularly cared about being able to install Debian on the Pre, because Debian will run on any hardware you throw at it because Debian is open software and can be made to run on anything you want it to. It doesn't matter that locked down devices exist as long as open ones do, because the software will run on any device.
This is something that Android can do that WebOS couldn't.
ETA:
I think the tl;dr of this would be "Hardware is a commodity; software isn't."
Android provably can be made to work on phones which weren't even made with that in mind. This apparently didn't happen with webOS, which counters "you don't really need the source"—though hackers have a healthy disdain for that attitude even if it had been true.
WebOS is the standard Linux kernel with a new desktop environment. If you can get the Linux kernel running on a device, throw on a WebKit browser and you've got WebOS. That's how its so easy to get Debian/Ubuntu running on a Touchpad with a simple chroot.
WebOS aside, support the maker of (more) open hardware. Support the people who give you full control of your device by default (even if they didn't initially give you the source for their WM).
WebOS was on two very mediocre phones (if not at their release, then definitely years later when they were still the flagship devices) and wasn't open source.
WebOS was open source except for Luna, and the devices were okay midrange phones at launch. After the market snubbed them, Palm didn't have enough money to keep creating newer and better phones.