Mainly "something" instead of nothing at all. HP was unable to find a suitor willing to buy or license webOS from them to recoup some of the massive cost of purchasing Palm. As a webOS user (TouchPad and a FrakenPre2 on Sprint) I can't wait for all of webOS to be open-sourced. At that point there will be the possibility of porting to current hardware by the webos-internals team.
Making it open source could potentially lead to future revenue similar to the way other companies that heavily leverage open source. Red Hat and Google come to mind. They QA new features into the main build and offer service and consulting for Enyo/webOS. Maybe the mere fact of open sourcing the code will generate more interest vs. when it was closed.
Comments
What's in it for HP?
Mainly "something" instead of nothing at all. HP was unable to find a suitor willing to buy or license webOS from them to recoup some of the massive cost of purchasing Palm. As a webOS user (TouchPad and a FrakenPre2 on Sprint) I can't wait for all of webOS to be open-sourced. At that point there will be the possibility of porting to current hardware by the webos-internals team.
Making it open source could potentially lead to future revenue similar to the way other companies that heavily leverage open source. Red Hat and Google come to mind. They QA new features into the main build and offer service and consulting for Enyo/webOS. Maybe the mere fact of open sourcing the code will generate more interest vs. when it was closed.