Open webOS 1.0 is here

The GitHub repository is at <a href="https://github.com/openwebos/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openwebos/</a> for anyone who is interested.<p>I'm tentatively excited by this. webOS was my 'first love' in modern mobile operating systems. Though it lacked the polish of iOS and was limited by the hardware both Palm and HP chose to pair with it, it was ahead of its time in many respects.<p>Just think, before the original Droid launched on Verizon, webOS had more marketshare and mindshare than Android. Imagine what could have been.

Hold the phone. It's Linux based, open source, and apps are written in Javascript, not Java?<p>Down with Android. Long live webOS!

I wonder if a better approach would be to rebuild WebOS on top of an Android base instead? It seems like they are choosing to fight a war they cannot possibly win. If they want to run on other people's hardware why not build on top of a very well supported platform? Any rooted phone would have 100% driver support. Could be easier than installing a custom ROM. At least they would be able to get a foothold in the market. If my Galaxy Nexus could run the WebOS UI and continue to run legacy Android apps I would switch over right now. I know this isn't really the original goal of this project and maybe there are good technical reasons this would not be possible. It just seems like it would achieve the same thing in a more practical way. Perhaps they could maintain both a standalone WebOS and a WebOS/Android version?

Might have some pretty major security flaws...<p><a href="https://github.com/openwebos/core-apps/tree/master/com.palm.app.email#html-sanitizer-function-used-in-the-email-display-message-view-is-limited-to-remove-only-certain-tags-such-as-script-iframe-object-embed-more-generic-solution-is-planned-for-post-beta-release" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openwebos/core-apps/tree/master/com.palm....</a>

I loved WebOS, but part of the key to the gestures, on my Pixi at least, was the touch sensitive area beneath the screen. I didn't expect that to translate well to the tablet form factor, though I never tried a touchpad running WebOS.

If (usable) builds come for the Galaxy Nexus, I will be forced to try this out :)

WebOS could do something different and allow for apps to be loaded on the fly via a URL. Oh wait, that's what a web browser does..Why isn't WebOS aiming to be a web browser with the ability to cache apps using standardized (or maybe non-standard if needed) technologies? Then, you wouldn't need a marketplace or app store necessarily, because users have access to the apps directly off the web. Not to mention, this will save storage and move towards cloud computing more nicely. Oh, and think about how easy it would be to transfer an application from device to another device. WebOS should focus on being just that, a web OS. This means URLs; DNS is the backbone of the web after all.

Curious, is this helpful to people building web apps or ios/android mobile apps ?

These mobile platforms that use web tech(boot to gecko, webOS, etc) really aught to wait till ES.Next becomes implemented before they go 1.0. If they have C++ code extensions, they aught to wait till C++11 is full implemented in their compiler of choice.