ZDNet writer Jason Perlow gets it wrong on webOS and Homebrew
ZDNet's Jason Perlow has penned an article titled "HP: If you want folks to thack the TouchPad, then Open Source it" that as the title suggests, insists that HP should open-source the entirety of webOS in order to boost development and alleviate the performance issues that have dogged the TouchPad and webOS 3.0 since its release over a month ago.
Perlow begins his article by explaining what Homebrew is (or "3rd-party software", in his parlance) and cites the overclocking and patching experience of fellow ZDNet blogger and TouchPad enthusiast James Kendrick. He agrees with his collegues experiences:
I’ve tested them on my own loaner TouchPad and I can say definitively that they absolutely do work. If you own a TouchPad, I strongly recommend installing them.
He then continues to deride the performance issues of the Touchpad as a failure of HP to "execute at software engineering". Of course, Perlow can't be familiar with the engineering processes that brought the TouchPad and webOS 3.0 to fruition. Some reports suggest that overall development time, including hardware and re-writing all of the native applications against a brand-new software development framework took between 6-8 months. It's one thing to criticize the performance of the TouchPad -- up until recently it's been absolutely sub par and almost universally panned -- but it's another thing to guess at the engineering processes behind a product.
The real issue with Perlow's article, though, is the accusation that the webOS Internals group is somehow on HP's payroll or a "double-secret community" of developers:
I’ve learned on the down-low that the WebOSInternals folks are apparently acting as a form of supplementary engineering team for Hewlett-Packard who is using them to exchange code and software engineering expertise as needed to integrate it into their products
We here at the webOSDaily have known and have written about the webOS Internals team on and off for nearly 3 years, and that's a ballsy accusation -specially when the information is learned "on the down-low".
One of the organization's tenants is improve and make better the overall webOS experience to be sure. Most of the software written by the group is licensed in such a way that HP can easily incorporate it into their software should they choose to (something that's already happened).
To accuse them of being in league with HP in any other way than their current (and publicly stated) collaborative way is, in a word, absurd.
