After weeks of deliberation, Hewlett-Packard (HP) will now contribute its webOS mobile operating system to the open source community.

Meg Whitman, HP’s newly-minted president and chief executive officer, said in a media statement Friday: ”webOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable. By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices”.

All webOS source codes will be available under an open source license to be determined later. HP will engage the open source community to define the charter of the new open source project under a set of operating principles that include accelerating the open development of the platform and transparent governance to avoid fragmentation.

The news might come as a surprise to tech pundits. Some expected HP to license webOS to device manufacturers, especially Android phone companies who could find webOS a viable option to hedge against any impartiality arising out of Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

Others reckoned HP might sell webOS to a device maker, but it’s unlikely anyone would take up the offer — or burden — of growing the platform on its own. If a company the size of HP could not succeed with webOS, who could? The most likely candidate to pick up webOS is Amazon, but the online retail giant is already betting on Android with the Kindle Fire.

HP had high hopes for webOS when it acquired the mobile platform along with its US$1.2 billion purchase of Palm in last year. Back then, it planned to role out webOS not just on tablets and phones, but also on printers and laptops. While HP did a good job with the TouchPad, its flagship webOS device that received favourable reviews, the initial sales numbers for the TouchPad were disappointing.

When Leo Apotheker came onboard, the former embattled CEO scuttled HP’s webOS business. The TouchPad was tossed out of HP’s inventory in fire sales in some markets, where the device was sold for just US$99. In Singapore, eager consumers started queuing up as early as 4am to score a TouchPad at the Comex show earlier in September.

Now that the dust has settled, what will “open sourcing” webOS mean for the future of the platform?

To be sure, HP is not washing its hands off completely. The company said it will continue to be active in the development and support of webOS, though we are not sure if releasing webOS source codes merely means more “opportunities to significantly improve applications and web services for the next generation of devices”. Such statements are unlikely to lure developers already working on existing platforms that are gaining far more traction in the market.

Moreover, there are already open source mobile platforms like MeeGo and Android, with the latter being more successful. Developers have limited time and resources to write code for yet another platform with a fledgling ecosystem and limited apps – a chief bugbear that underdogs like Windows Phone and webOS have to grapple with.

With the exception of Mozilla Firefox, few open source projects that started life as proprietary software have been wildly successful. Sun Microsystem’s OpenOffice, which started out as StarOffice, is hardly making a dent in office productivity software. OpenSolaris, the open source offspring of Sun’s Solaris Unix-based OS, was supposed to give Linux a run for its money with advanced features like the ZFS file system. That project was killed by Oracle after it acquired Sun.

WebOS could well be picked up by a smattering of third-tier device makers, but the only way for any upstart mobile platform to snatch significant market share away from incumbents is to deliver a superior experience backed by a rich mobile app ecosystem, open source or not. HP has chosen to offload that task to the open source community, but whether developers will bite remains to be seen.

If you need to use a Windows program occasionally on a Mac but don’t want to cough up US$80 for Parallels Desktop 7, a new Mac app by NES Software might be worth considering.

Dubbed WinOnX, the US$4.99 app is based on the Wine open source project that lets users of Linux and Unix-based operating systems run Windows applications through a software compatibility layer. As a former Linux user, I depended on Wine to run Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and some utility applications.

WinOnX is simple to use. Just launch any Windows installer file and WinOnX will be fired up immediately. After you’ve gone through the installation process, a launcher for your Windows program will be created in the Applications list and Start menu.

To be sure, WinOnX will not run all Windows applications. You may hit a wall with newer titles like Adobe Acrobat X Pro which can’t be installed. Internet Explorer would not run, while Firefox 3.6 worked flawlessly. Adobe Acrobat Reader was successfully installed, but the software could not run beyond its splash screen.

I had better luck with Office 2007 – Microsoft Word, Outlook and Excel 2007 worked like a charm, though the same could not be said for PowerPoint 2007 and the Microsoft Office 2010 productivity suite. As a guide, if a Windows application is not supported by Wine, don’t count on it to work in WinOnX.

NES Software CEO Hisham El-Emam said in an e-mail to Techgoondu: “Our offer is that we open the doors to the Windows universe for 5 bucks”.

“Seventy percent of the Windows programs will work and the rest will run buggy or not at all. We think that’s a fair deal. In case you need run a specific Windows program we always recommend to use Bootcamp or Parallels. But for occasional use WinOnX is the fastest and easiest way to try it out,” he added.

We think it’s a fair deal too. WinOnX is available from the Apple Mac App Store and requires Mac OS X 10.6 and later to run, but do check out Wine’s list of compatible Windows software before taking the plunge.

Amidst the brouhaha surrounding the spat between Oracle and Salesforce at Oracle Openworld this year, Oracle unveiled a public cloud service to strengthen its position in the SaaS market. The world’s second largest software maker also announced significant products that would help companies make better business decisions by making sense of the growing avalanche of corporate data. Here’s a rundown of the key announcements and what they mean for enterprises:

Oracle Public Cloud
Aimed squarely at the Salesforce crowd, the Oracle Public Cloud provides access to Oracle Fusion Applications including customer relationship management and human capital management, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Database, on the cloud.

To top it off, Oracle Public Cloud comes with the Oracle Social Network that allows workers to receive real-time information feeds and collaborate with one another. Users will have access to a range of collaboration tools, including profiles, groups, activity feeds, status updates, discussion forums, document sharing, co-browsing, instant messaging and web conferencing.

Oracle is also making it easy for companies to move existing applications that currently reside in their own datacenters to the cloud. Existing Java-based applications and the Oracle Database can be deployed onto Oracle Public Cloud without code changes, allowing companies to take advantage of existing IT assets and skills. Pricing for Oracle Public Cloud will be based on a monthly subscription. Each hosted application can be purchased independently of others.

What this means
If you intend to move your Oracle apps and other Java-based applications to the cloud, the Oracle Public Cloud will be the smoothest path to take. While the Salesforce cloud supports Java through Heroku, a cloud application platform acquired by Salesforce last year, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claimed that Heroku does not run J2EE apps. For an explanation of what Heroku supports (or not), check out this blog post by Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins.

In any case, the Oracle cloud still provides a quick way to test-drive new apps and services on the cloud before deploying them in-house, if you are operating on the on-premise deployment model. Companies that are planning to extend access to their existing applications to new office locations can also tap on the Oracle cloud without incurring new hardware costs.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance
This appliance, which combines x86 processors with high-capacity disks that offer up to 432 terabytes of storage, will help companies manage the growing pool of big data, or unstructured data, from e-mail systems, sensors, smart meters and social networks. These data sets are so huge that they cannot be stored and analyzed with standard database management tools. Companies, however, are increasingly seeing the need to make sense of these vast amounts of data to improve business decision making.

What’s in the box: Oracle NoSQL Database, a distributed database for managing massive quantities of data and coping with changing data formats; an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, a Java framework for processing and querying vast amounts of data on large clusters of commodity hardware; Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop that simplifies creation of data processing jobs on Hadoop; Oracle Loader for Hadoop to load datasets from the Hadoop environment into Oracle Database 11g; and the open source distribution of R, a free software environment for statistical computing.

The Oracle Big Data Appliance is integrated with Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and the Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine. Oracle says this integration will let companies organize and analyse all their structured and unstructured data together.

What this means
Oracle did not say when the appliance would be ready. Moreover, running Hadoop – which is meant to work on massively distributed commodity hardware – on a single appliance does not make sense. More details on the benefits of such an implementation will need to be articulated before comparing Oracle’s appliance with similar offerings from Teradata, IBM and EMC.

Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine
Following the introduction of the Exadata database machine and the Exalogic middleware and application server, Oracle took the wraps off Exalytics, which is touted as the industry’s first in-memory hardware plus software system. The machine comprises Oracle’s Sun Fire server with 1 terabyte of RAM, the Intel Xeon E7-4800 processor with 40 cores, Oracle BI Foundation software including Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Essbase, and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Exalytics.

What this means
Instead of asking customers to buy yet another “Exa” box, Oracle could have baked the BI capabilities into Exadata, as opposed to moving data from Exadata into Exalytics. The reason for doing this is unclear, though it may be that Oracle Essbase (which can’t do calculations on the fly) and TimesTen can’t operate efficiently in Oracle’s database architecture. Sure, Oracle makes money selling boxes but enterprises would surely think twice about getting another piece of hardware when IT consolidation remains top on the priority list of CIOs.

If you thought having to choose between iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7 was enough of a headache, we’ve got news for you. Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox Web browser, has launched a new project called “Boot to Gecko”, or B2G, to “pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web”.

The end product will be an operating system that boots directly into the Web, like what Google’s Chrome OS is doing, only for your phone. A core component of the OS will be drawn from Android, to allow hardware to work easily. Mozilla plans on publishing the source code as it’s developed.

For a mobile device that is always to the Internet all the time, such an OS makes a lot of sense. It is already possible to run Web apps as mobile phone apps that are natively installed. An excellent example is Gmail on iPhone’s Safari, which works like a charm. Ultimately, B2G hopes to displace proprietary systems with an open Web standard.

But B2G is very much a work in progress. Although webpages are getting more powerful with the advent of HTML5, they still lack some of the rich functionality on natively-coded apps. That’s why one of the aims of B2G is also to identify these very gaps in functionality and think of ways to bridge them through nothing but Web programming.

This mammoth task could take a long time, and as far as mobile operating systems go, B2G is very forward-looking. In fact, it is surprising that Google didn’t announce anything like this first, since they are the “Internet Company” we all know.

We doubt B2G will materialise on the market any time soon, but it certainly is one to keep an eye on. In the meantime, let’s take a trip down memory lane and re-look at last year’s mobile phone concept by Mozilla, the Seabird:

In an Android Developers blog post yesterday, Android SDK tech lead Xavier Ducrohet announced that the full SDK for Android 3.0 is now available to developers.

The APIs are final, and developers can start creating apps for this new platform and publish them to Android Market.

Android 3.0, targeted at new tablet devices such as the Motorola Xoom, includes several new features for users and developers. These include a a new “holographic” user interface (UI) designed from the ground up to take advantage of larger displays.

According to Google, “the new UI brings fresh paradigms for interaction, navigation, and customization and makes them available to all applications – even those built for earlier versions of the platform. Applications written for Android 3.0 are able to use an extended set of UI objects, powerful graphics, and media capabilities to engage users in new ways”.

New to Android 3.0 is the System Bar located at the bottom of the screen that displays notifications, system status and navigation buttons. It also includes a Recent Apps list that lets you see the tasks underway and quickly jump from one app to another. While watching videos in full screen, you can dim the System Bar in a new lights out mode.

At the top of the screen lies the Action Bar, which is present whenever an app is running. It lets you access options, navigation and widgets. However, the content, theme and other properties in the Action Bar are managed by applications, rather than the underlying operating system.

The UI includes five customizable home screens, with visual cues and drop shadows that improve visibility when adjusting the layout of shortcuts and widgets. You also get a redesigned keyboard with a Tab key, improved text selection and copy-and-paste function.

The bundled apps have also been beefed up. The Android browser now sports an incogito mode for private browsing, a unified view for bookmarks and browsing history, as well as enhanced browsing on non-mobile sites. The Contacts, E-mail and Camera applications have also been tweaked to take advantage of the larger screen estate on tablet devices.

For developers, Android 3.0 offers a new framework for developing new UI widgets that support features such as 3D stack, search box, a date/time picker and popup menu, among others. The new platform, which supports multicore processors, also features hardware-accelerated 2D graphics and the Renderscript 3D graphics engine for generating 3D effects for applications, wallpapers and carousels.

More importantly, Android 3.0 is fully compatible with older Android apps which will work in the new holographic UI theme without code changes, according to Google.

Portions of this article are modifications based on work created and shared by the Android Open Source Project and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution License.

Those concerns were laid to rest on Monday by a top Oracle executive who shared the Java roadmap with JavaOne attendees on the sidelines of Oracle Openworld.

Thomas Kurian, Oracle executive vice-president for product development, said: “I’ve been at JavaOne since 1997, but this year is very special for us because it is the first year that Oracle is the steward and responsible for Java. What we want to do today is to make sure every developer is crystal clear on where we see the Java platform evolving.”

Oracle will unveil JDK 7 in 2011, with JDK 8 coming a year later, Kurian revealed. He also assured developers that Oracle is committed to delivering the best Java Virtual Machine as well as OpenJDK, the open source implementation of the Java programming language.

Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group at Oracle, told developers at a JavaOne general technical session Tuesday that the enhancements in the new JDKs are centered around productivity, performance, universality, modularity, integration, and serviceability of the Java platform.

For example, in Project Coin, small changes to Java’s syntax that help to reduce redundant codes are proposed, while Project Jigsaw aims to modularize Java by eliminating classpaths and describing library dependencies with a module path and the command jpkg.

JAR files can be built by jpkg, but other formats such as jmod, rpm and deb can be created as well. This allows users to install Java programs easily through standard package managers, Reinhold said.

Reinhold added that to meet the 2011 deadline for JDK 7, Project Jigsaw and Project Lambda – which proposes to add first-class functions, function types, and lambda expressions (informally, “closures”) to Java – will only be available in JDK 8 slated for a late 2012 release.

Kurian also detailed plans to provide a common programming model based on JavaFX across all Java platforms, with interoperability between HTML 5, Java and JavaScript. JavaFX is used for developing rich Internet applications such as video streaming.

“We’re going to give you a single programming model based on JavaFX that spans both (native Java and browser) domains,” he said.

Kurian also outlined efforts to jazz up Java apps with eye candy using a new graphics engine based on the Prism graphics stack that delivers 2D/3D vector graphics and high-quality media. In addition, developers can use JavaFX’s Swing programming routines in Prism to create snazzy user interfaces.

Future Java developments will continue to be guided by simplicity to ensure the programming language will be understood by another developer in the same organization, Reinhold said.

“Simplicity matters, things need to be understandable and a clear semantic model is essential,” he explained.

“Java tries very hard to be the same language everywhere, so as we evolve the language we’ll do it cautiously with a long term view,” he added. “We will add a few selected features periodically and I think going forward we’ll see relatively more features over the next few years than you’ve seen in the past.”

To date, Oracle Linux, which has claimed 5,000 customers, is built on the Red Hat Compatible Kernel that allows customers to continue running Red Hat applications.

In his keynote address Sunday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison highlighted key issues the company faced with retaining full compatibility with Red Hat.

“Oracle spends a lot of time finding bugs in Red Hat Linux and fixing them. However, when we find the bugs, Red Hat has been very slow in incorporating those bugs into their software,” he said.

Ellison also noted that Red Hat has also been slow to take up enhancements contributed by the community.

“They currently run a four year old version of Linux and that’s a huge problem for us because we build high-end Exalogic and Exadata machines that run Linux. We can’t afford to be four years behind in software,” he said.

Oracle Linux’s Red Hat compatible kernel, however, will still be available to customers, in addition to the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel that’s derived from the stable 2.6.32 mainline Linux kernel.

With the new development, Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel will continue to track the mainline Linux kernel and users will benefit from Oracle innovation and community enhancements at a much faster rate, Ellison said.

Oracle has also packed in several enhancements in the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel including data integrity extensions that stop corrupt data from being written to storage plus hardware fault management for improved application uptime.

Existing Oracle Linux and RHEL 5 users can upgrade to the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel with no reinstallation of the OS. Third-party apps that run on RHEL 5 should run unchanged on Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel with greater performance and reliability, Oracle said.

Oracle claims that Google has been aware of Sun’s patent portfolio, including the patents at issue, since the middle of this decade, when Google hired certain former Sun Java engineers.

The lawsuit leads one to question the intentions of Oracle’s latest lawsuit and its commitment to open source. Java has been covered by the open source General Public License since 2006, way before Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems was completed in January 2010.

Oracle claims that Google’s Android competes with Oracle’s Java as an operating system software platform for cellular telephones and other mobile devices.

“The Android operating system software stack consists of Java applications running on a Java-based object-oriented application framework, and core libraries running on a “Dalvik” virtual machine (VM) that features just-in-time (JIT) compilation. Google actively distributes Android (including without limitation the Dalvik VM and the Android software development kit) and promotes its use by manufacturers of products and applications.

“By purposefully and voluntarily distributing one or more of its infringing products and services, Google has injured Oracle America and is thus liable to Oracle America for infringement of the patents at issue,” Oracle said in its filing with the Northern District Court of California.

Oracle’s financial gains from this lawsuit are obviously huge, thanks to surging sales of Android devices. While it’s probable that talks between the two tech giants broke down, leading Oracle to pull punches against the world’s favorite search engine, Oracle seems to have veered away from Sun’s commitment to foster innovation through open source Java in a bid to monetize the Java platform more aggressively than Sun ever did.

On Friday, Google called the Oracle lawsuit a baseless one, adding that “open-source Java community goes beyond any one corporation and works every day to make the web a better place. We will strongly defend open-source standards and will continue to work with the industry to develop the Android platform.”

It is not in Oracle’s interest to upset the Java ecosystem, especially with the strides that Java — through Android — has made in the mobile space in recent years. Neither does it want mobile developers to ditch the platform for something else. With this lawsuit against Google, Oracle is walking on a tight rope, one that it needs to tread carefully.

Miller co-founded TurboLinux in 1992, bringing commercial Linux to Japan and China in the 1990s. He also co-founded Mountain View Data in 2000, which provided Linux-based data storage software and server provisioning software to the enterprise.

Miller’s counterpart, Lu is a co-founder at DeviceVM and, as the senior vice president of business development, continues to close worldwide contracts with leading OEMs to bring Linux to netbooks, notebooks and desktop PCs.

The choice of China and Taiwan to unleash a fresh wave of innovation in the Linux platform on servers and mobile devices is hardly surprising.

Taiwan has always been a hotbed for mobile and embedded development. The Linux Foundation noted that “there are a variety of companies in the country that today are increasing their participation in the Linux development community and initiatives such as MeeGo”.

In China, which Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin said is an important part of the Linux community, companies and Linux developers are building the most innovative technologies and are running Linux in enterprises across the country.

Miller said: “Before long, there will be over a billion people in China connecting with each other via mobile phones, PCs and other devices.

“And what better way to make their experience quick, reliable and fun than to use Linux? I’m eager to enable broader Linux use through promoting give-and-take among Chinese developers, consumers and companies.”

Until now, the Linux Foundation’s Asia-Pacific operations were only limited to Japan and Korea.

In a blog post last week, the veteran Nokia executive who has been working to get Linux onto Nokia phones since 2000, announced that the MeeGo repository will be opened by the end of this month. The source and binary repo will provide a raw baseline for building MeeGo on the Nokia N900 and Intel Atom-based netbooks.

What’s more interesting is the flurry of debate surrounding the details – or lack thereof – related to the processes that will enable the open source development model to flourish around the MeeGo platform. So far, Halla has said little about the decisions made by the technical steering group to choose RPM rather than deb as the package manager for MeeGo:

While code is certainly the most important question, the most frequently asked, however, has been about technology selections. The big ticket items like Qt, OBS and RPM were already communicated at the launch and as we expected, kicked off a few small avalanches of debate! These selections were, of course, pre-agreed and I can assure you that the amount of effort spent in resolving these was not small. After all, these are the points driving most of the investment cost and transition pains for Nokia, Intel and the Moblin and Maemo communities. Further selections are mostly still under discussion and beyond a few obvious ones (X, connman, ofono, gstreamer, dbus,…) can be considered as working assumptions for MeeGo 1 release. Now that the internal responsibilities within Intel and Nokia are becoming clear I expect that the people behind these selections and assumptions will start appearing in meego.com pages, mailing lists and wikis during the coming days.

This has generated some concerns that developers are being left out of the conversation, thus increasing their skepticism of the purported “openness” of the MeeGo platform. To be fair, it was necessary for the steering group to make some hard decisions at the beginning of a big open source initiative that merges two existing platforms. Otherwise, we could argue till the cows come home and nothing will move.

But what is the process that governs these decisions? Are we talking about a process similar to JCP (Java Community Process), where there are clearly defined procedures for the development and revision of the Java’s technology specifications?

Other tough questions that need to be addressed: driver support from hardware and device manufacturers, DRM support that is compatible with operators’ content business and application support for potentially different variants of MeeGo that could emerge. The technical steering group should address these issues early on if it wants to seed a rich developer ecosystem that is crucial for the success of any mobile platform.