I might not be reading this right, but in my mind this summarized as:

* WebOS added custom API's to handle parts of the phone hardware that are not web standard, for eg. phone calls, SMS

* The Firefox project also added custom API's, except they are submitting them for standardization as web interfaces

Why not just implement the WebOS API's and thus make them a standard, or are they considered flawed in some way that the B2G project now solves?

This option would have had the added bonus of immediate interop with WebOS applications, developer learning curve, documentation, etc.

I'm not intimately acquainted with it, but I believe that some of the WebOS API's were too intimately tied to their Javascript framework.

I'm sure that Firefox OS used the WebOS API's as inspiration though.

webOS had some ugly bits under the hood that probably would have required cleanup.

This would have been great if webOS was in a form ready to be adopted by Mozilla or someone else.

As it stands, open webOS has still yet to ship (hopefully soon). Most likely because it has taken this much time to untangle the non-open bits.

Even though I understand the reasons why, I'm still extremely bummed that this effort does not cover the Pre3 (or phone based device). Which means people will not be able to go back and retroactively fix a lot of the unfinished bits on the phones.