Yikes, talk about unfortunate timing. With HP having just recently announced that webOS is going open source, the last thing they need is for their (small, but surprisingly capable) developer community to start falling apart. They lost Richard Kerris, VP of Worldwide Developer Relations, to Nokia back in late October — and today, another of their Developer Relations guys is headed for the door.
Chuq Von Respach, Community Head for webOS Developer Relations who describes his job as being the “primary contact point between HP and it’s webOS application developers”, has just disclosed (via the developer relations forums, in fact) that tomorrow will be his last day at the company.
While Chuq says that his leaving “has nothing to do with any of the announcements in the last couple of weeks” and that the decision to open up webOS is one he “support[s] fully”, he says that he’d already started planning the departure after an unnamed company recruited him back in October.
Alas, this just makes HP’s already difficult mission of properly opening up webOS that much more challenging. Beyond working through a mess of licensing and somehow ensuring that they’re not shining a spotlight on vulnerabilities in existing (and potentially difficult to update) handsets, they’re starting to run low on people whose job it is to keep their developer pack intact.
Best of luck, Chuq.