I didn't intend for that to be scare quotes, I intended for it to sarcasm quotes. People hide behind the open source name even if open source means nothing. It doesn't matter if your OS is open source if your hardware can't be made to boot your newly-compiled version. WebOS, in my opinion, balances base-Linux with open (enough) hardware better than the Android phones with an open source system (except for 3.0) and completely closed hardware.
I'm not talking strictly hardware, though you may be talking strictly software. That may be where the disagreement is stemming from. The point of the article is about the locked bootloader restricting access to the hardware. I'm posing my opinion that Palm WebOS devices were more open than a good number of Android-based handsets, overall. With market support, WebOS could have been the open-iPhone. I put "open source" in sarcasm-quotes because the tradeoff is freedom of your hardware.
>I'm not talking strictly hardware, though you may be talking strictly software. That may be where the disagreement is stemming from. The point of the article is about the locked bootloader restricting access to the hardware.
The thing you're overlooking is that it's possible to run Android on hardware without these conditions. If you want a completely unlocked phone, there's the Nexus series in the mainstream and there are other devices that are relatively open on the hardware side as well.
The point is, you had the option of running Android on any hardware you liked. With WebOS, you had no option but Palm. That's the very definition of vendor lock-in.
Nobody particularly cared about being able to install Debian on the Pre, because Debian will run on any hardware you throw at it because Debian is open software and can be made to run on anything you want it to. It doesn't matter that locked down devices exist as long as open ones do, because the software will run on any device.
This is something that Android can do that WebOS couldn't.
ETA:
I think the tl;dr of this would be "Hardware is a commodity; software isn't."
I'm not talking strictly hardware, though you may be talking strictly software. That may be where the disagreement is stemming from. The point of the article is about the locked bootloader restricting access to the hardware. I'm posing my opinion that Palm WebOS devices were more open than a good number of Android-based handsets, overall. With market support, WebOS could have been the open-iPhone. I put "open source" in sarcasm-quotes because the tradeoff is freedom of your hardware.