Developer Week in Review: HP sets webOS free

HP wraps webOS up with a bow, Oracle lands in court, and one lucky coder escapes justice.

Hard to believe there’s only 15 days left in 2011; it’s flown by so quickly. Next week, I’ll be putting out the much anticipated Developer Year In Review, highlighting the ups and downs of the industry over the last 12 months. But for the moment, enjoy these pre-holiday tidbits:

HP gets into the spirit of the season

HP WebOSEvidently, Meg Whitman was visited by three ghosts recently because she opened her window last week and shouted for the boy downstairs to run to the butcher and buy the big goose in the window so it could be delivered to Bob Cratchit’s house. Except in this case, the goose was the source code to webOS, and the lucky recipient was the open source community.

It’s certainly a magnanimous gesture on the part of HP, and it’s likely to lead to any number of interesting spin-off projects. It will also provide an interesting contrast to the current open-source tablet darling, Android. Exactly who will administer the project and which license it will be released under is still uncertain. Hopefully, it will be a relatively permissive license so it can freely cross-pollinate.

For HP, this is definitely making the best of a bad situation. As readers may recall, I’ve harped on several occasions about how Oracle has been shedding itself of many of the assets it acquired when it purchased Sun. But as far as throwing away money, Oracle is bush-league compared to HP. It’s taken less than two years for HP to relegate the $1.2 billion it paid for Palm to the “capital losses” column in its tax return.

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And speaking of Oracle …

Anyone who has ever been involved in the negotiations for an outside vendor to deliver a software solution knows that it’s an inexact science, at best. There always turns out to be requirements that were missed or technical complications that turn up during deployment, and customers are usually (reluctantly) willing to pay the piper because they have already committed to the solution.

Montclair State University evidently decided to try plan B when Oracle went over budget and missed deadlines on the university’s new ERP system. They are taking Mr. Ellison’s yacht-funding enterprise to federal court, accusing Oracle of rigging the demo and trying (in the words of the university) to extort money by threatening not to complete the work unless paid millions more in fees.

It may be dicey to figure out if Montclair understated its requirements or if Oracle low-balled the bid since I’ve yet to see a requirements spec for a fixed-price contract that was worth the paper it was written on. Oracle can at least take comfort from the fact that Montclair doesn’t have a law school, so there won’t be any pro bono faculty members on the legal team.

On the other hand, T&M has its perils, too

Some companies prefer to bid contracts as time and materials (T&M), rather than fixed price. This is a good deal for the contractor because it won’t get caught underfunded if things turn out to be complicated. For the customer, it offers the benefit of being able to pull the plug if things aren’t working out or to add and remove requirements without having to renegotiate. The downside for the contractor is that it can’t profit from finishing early.

Of course, this all assumes that the contractor is actually working on the project. In a recent case, your tax dollars (for all you American readers) were going to pay someone to watch movies, hang out in bars, and ride roller coasters. California-based Aerospace Corp just paid the Department of Justice a nice round $2.5 million to settle allegations that not only was it billing time for an employee who was moonlighting at another firm, but that he spent his days at leisure while billing both firms.

Incredibly, this went on for five years, despite such stunts as billing for more than 24 hours of work in a single day. You almost have to admire the chutzpah of Mr. William Grayson Hunter, who also inflated his high school diploma into a doctorate from Oxford. He also managed to die of natural causes before the long arm of the law could bring him to justice, presumably with a smile on his face and a Six Flags hat on his head.

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