Roy Sutton is the community manager for HP's Open webOS. He supports developers in porting Open webOS to new platforms and is a contributor to the Enyo project. Roy too a few minutes for an interview with the SCALE Team about his presentation "From Closed to Open: The Open webOS Story," which will take place at 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 24, in room Los Angeles B.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: Hi! I'm Roy Sutton and I'm the Open webOS Community Manager for HP's webOS group. I've had a long career in embedded systems, having previously run Data Net (http://www.data-net.com), a manufacturer of barcode and RFID data collection systems. I am pleased that webOS is now an open source project. I am also a published author. My first book, Enyo: Up and Running (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920027751.do), is available from O'Reilly Media.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk you're giving (unless you want to), can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: Open source projects live and die by their communities. A lot of what I will talk about will focus on the path the Open webOS took and how we foster the community.
Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: This is my first trip to SCALE and I'm very excited to be attending. If anything, all the fantastic content may be too much! I know I won't be able to attend all the sessions that look interesting.
Q: You're giving two talks that center around Open webOS. Why does Open webOS matter?
A: webOS was the first mobile OS based on web standards for native app development. Its touch-based UI was widely appreciated. Open webOS brings this approach to the open source community. By releasing the code under an Apache 2.0 license we believe we can give developers more ways to use this technology in their own projects and products. We want to make Open webOS a more collaborative open source OS than some of the other embedded Linux variants out there.
Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
A: I look forward to seeing you at SCALE!
[SCALE Team interview by Larry Cafiero]