Santa Comes Early for WebOS Fans

Leo Apotheker never got it.  Today, HP announces a big gift to developers, WebOS is going open source.  

Yes this is strategic since HP's bread and butter is with printers. Well what in the heck does that have to do with WebOS you ask?   WebOS is the e-ticket for HP [yeah, you might pick up on the double entendre].  It's the printers, silly.

HP is building an infrastructure on ePrint. Here's what was in an April 2011 HP white paper titled Mobile Printing Strategy:

"HP ePrint makes mobile printing easy for large enterprises, small businesses, on-the-go professionals and consumers. Now anyone with an email- and Internet-enabled device can print documents, photos, presentations, reports and more—from their enterprise company offices, hotels, airport lounges and print-and-copy retail stores."

Since HP has already built printers with pad devices, I expect WebOS connectivity is and will continue to be built into their printers. 

Better yet, from my standpoint, WebOS is arguably will be more secure, a factor that I expect will make HP eprint less vulnerable to hackers.  To illustrate my point, in case you missed this recent finding by Columbia University, it illustrates how printers could be affected. 

My recent reluctance to move to Android platform is in part based upon the security issues with apps being published but not vetted by a recognized authority.