HP has just announced, that their palm inheritance - the Web OS, which ran on the discontinued HP TouchPad disaster (and post-Palm phones), will go Open Source!
This means that it’ll eventually be available to phone makers the same way Android is today. And with all those legal battles, Carrier IQ’s, viruses, malware, piracy and whatnot it might not be a bad choice for the likes of HTC (or even Samsung) to quit the Android platform once and for all.
Web OS is actually a well designed, intuitive and original piece of software, unlike Android, so it’ll push the market forward instead of just being a poor (but popular) copy of iOS. The repeating story of windows poorly copying Mac OS comes to mind here, doesn’t it?
If it all goes through, making mobile apps and games will be harder than ever, with way too many platforms for indie developers to successfully develop for. But in any case this is good news, because I much prefer Web OS over Android, and would like to see the platform grow. Exciting times with Windows Phone 7 gaining market share we might have a re-shuffle of the mobile system ranks soon.