So many things wrong here. In particular, > But the successful Open Source offerings were created in Open Source form. They weren’t “contributed” in a last-dit

So many things wrong here. In particular, > But the successful Open Source offerings were created in Open Source form. They weren’t “contributed” in a last-ditch effort to save face after unsuccessful attempts to monetize a proprietary version. No, that isn't true at all. Many very successful open source projects were "contributed" after commercial development, for example OpenOffice and Netscape/Mozilla. And we might as well list Android there too, it's developed behind closed doors and contributed periodically as open source - and it seems to be doing quite well. It's true that sometimes projects are "contributed" in the sense of donating them and forgetting about them. But that doesn't mean all contributions of previously closed-source code are unsuccessful. Furthermore, the author seems to only value huge amounts of revenue as a marker of success. The only FOSS project they consider to be "a success" is apparently Red Hat with $10B market cap. It's a success, to be sure, but to say all other open source projects are not (including ones with hundreds of millions of users!) is just funny. Given the situation HP is in, open sourcing WebOS makes the most sense. There is no other good option. Some good analysis, which is spot on as opposed to the article here, can be found at http://www.andrewsavory.com/blog/2011/2168 http://www.andrewsavory.com/blog/2011/2168