Developer Roundup – Talking About Open Sourcing webOS with Dots And Lines

In the world of Twitter Apps, Carbon and Graphite are synonymous with EPIC. Both on the smartphone and the Touchpad, Dots and Lines sets the standard for twitter apps that all other twitter apps must live up to of perish.

Saleh Esmaeili (a.k.a. Moe) from Dots and Lines was kind enough to sit down with us – from a couple thousand miles away – and chit chat with us about webOS and where we all are in this crazy mixed up open sourced world. So, Moe…..

Now that HP intends to open source webOS, what does that mean for you as a developer?

I think it still means the same as the day HP discontinued webOS hardware. For a developer who lives on developing apps, it’s important for our apps to sell, given device/hardware cuts it is hard to decide what to do next given that every other platform out there is trying their best to make a home for current webOS developers with tempting offers and support. If my webOS apps were side projects I would’ve had a neutral stand and actually be on the webOS open source ship.

Going forward do you anticipate you will develop further apps for webOS?

I stopped the development of my third webOS app(Nitrous) the moment news broke about HP discontinuing webOS hardware. I’m trying to get some sort of a project started with collaboration with other webOS developers, commercial apps though? The future is gray for now, until we know how the App Catalog is going to be handled and either Geo Restrictions are going to be lifted or not. Keeping in mind that usually the open source community has a thing for free-of-charge software (not to be mistaken with open/free software), hard to sell apps to an open source community.

Do you plan to develop for other platforms? If so, which?

We’ve already been developing for WP7, launching our final version in the next 10 days, so yea! Carbon for Windows Phone is finally going to be out. Carbon is also being developed for iPhone and Graphite is being “ported” to iPad. We’re looking for a capable Android developer to join us in getting Carbon out on Android as well. So yea… We’ve been doing that before the fall of the grand master Leo.

Do you plan on contributing to the project itself, besides just continued application development?

I would love to, if there’s anything/projects that I could get in with UI/UX or Visuals I’d take it and would gladly be part of it. Still looking at ways to be able to contact, well, contact who at this point? Let’s wait for the “who is who” announcement when Open Sourcing actually takes place.

What role would you like to see HP take in governing the project?

I doubt that HP would take any role (apart from cranking up the project). For what it’s worth, I believe the whole Open Sourcing of webOS is a huge PR disaster recovery from the awful press that breaking webOS news has given HP. Seeing seniors leave and talent just moving towards other platforms, I doubt that they’ll be even able to handle that by their own. Time’ll tell.

Are there any thoughts on licensing options you would like to see used for the open sourced OS and/or its frameworks such as ENYO? For example MIT, Apache, GPL?

I wouldn’t know. All I care about as a developer at this point is the ability to use Enyo or contribute to it and be able to use it for developing apps on other Mobile platforms too, even Mobile Web if possible. Even if it means paying for a fork of Enyo that does a better job. Free? Open? Or both? All are welcome.

Are there other open source projects that you feel are good examples of how you would like to see the webOS project operate? For example, JQuery?

jQuery? Yea, but definitely not jQuery Mobile. Mozilla? That’d be a better example, PHP? Drupal? I think they’re a bit better to want webOS to relate to in the way they’ve been operated. Hopefully not like Android.