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 Originally Posted by dignitary
I'm pretty sure this community doesn't need blanket statements like this thrown around when webOS is struggling to attract developer talent and keep the developers it has left when most have already moved on.
Some might defend what boovish said as one person's opinion, but I call it immature and grossly misinformed. There's an enormous amount of great talent developing for other platforms simply because it gets them exponentially greater exposure, puts food on their table for them and their families, and has the retail support necessary to sustain their business now and in the future.
webOS can currently offer exactly none of this.
For those here saying "we need to concentrate on webOS apps", even in the most optimistic view, webOS simply doesn't generate the kind of money necessary to attract that kind of talent (much less keep the talent webOS used to have), and may never will if its percentage of market share remains a fraction of 1% like it is today. No companies pumping out popular titles will realistically invest time, money, and developer resources at a platform with a near-guaranteed loss--nor do they do charity work.
Look at it this way: If webOS paid the bills, a lot of high-profile webOS developers wouldn't have already left, pulled their apps, or simply stopped updating to concentrate on other platforms using Enyo and Phonegap. Now just a very small handful remain.
Embrace the selection and opportunity for webOS users the OpenMobile ACL could bring if it ever comes out. If it doesn't, webOS has a critical problem on its hands, Open webOS or not. The "app rot" will just continue in the App Catalog with not much to replace it.
So to rephrase you say, that webOS is dead anyway and we can only hope to get some android apps running on our legacy devices, so we can have some fun for a few more months...
Because the ACL won't help with any of the developer issues that you pointed out (which truly are there). It furthermore puts all remaining webOS developers into competition with the Andriod app world, i.e. even more of them will get into trouble.
So for (webOS) devs the ACL is a very bad thing... for the user this might help a bit in forgetting that there are only few devs that develop for webOS... but for the plattform it won't help much either... the apps won't get better because of the ACL. Most probably we will have to face compatibility issues, I suspect them to happen very regularly for everything apart from games. What about multitasking? Can you run multiple Android apps with ACL? What about memory overhead? Our webOS hardware isn't the most kicking anyway... some extra VMs won't do much good there, either.
If we really have to rely on Android apps to be made compatible through some ACL, webOS is doomed. ACL can be helpful at times and might help getting back some of the users that left webOS because they were lacking some certain app... but if Open webOS can't attract some developers on it's own that do native apps... what is left of webOS then? Why should anybody really go through the hassle to remove Android from his phone, try to get Open webOS onto it and then run the same Apps on it only working much worse because of the compability layer and memory overhead? 
For the overall success of webOS the ACL won't help much...
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