HP has purchased a prosperous software developer company "Bluestone"
(at the time based in my neighborhood in NJ),
for about $500 million, just to "open source" it a year later,
and then "write off" complete investment soon after.
The code development team of about 30 people (out of total 400)
has quietly moved to Oracle a few miles down the road (Rt. 38),
from Mt.Laurel to Moorestown...
So Oracle got a core developers team "for free".
With Palm WebOS the history is repeating.
HP is again one "paying the bill", with $1.2 Billion lost on Palm,
and software WebOS is (again) open-sourced,
and core development team has moved "for free",
this time to Google.
In fact this is good in general, just not a good business for HP...
Exclusive: HP's core webOS Enyo team is going to Google | The Verge:
The WebOS app platfrom is in fact a HTML5/JavaScript library/framework, using WebKit browser.
As such it can run in any modern web browser,
and could very well be used inside of Chrome and Android.
With a little bit of tooling, preferably based on PhoneGap (now Apache Cordova) or similar,
it can make development of portable apps easy for everybody, not just pro developers...
Why would Google do it?
Advertising. Free apps could still advertise, and that is how Google makes money.
I would suggest Google to provide official port of Android for HP TouchPad,
that would also include support for WebOS apps. Just merge them, both are based on Linux anyway.
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