HP WebOS to be open source by autumn 2012

HP has released a calendar elating to their WebOS platform – a system to become open source by the third quarter of 2012.

Purchased by HP with the acquisition of Palm in 2010 for 1.2 billion dollars so that the company could develop their mobile strategy on the OS, the company abandoned the system in August 2011 through a large reorganization. It has now been announced that the WebOS mobile operating system will be transformed into an open source platform.

This is the decision that HP has made, after failing to sell the mobile OS at the right price, which would have allowed them to recover some of their initial investment while improving the platforms chances of capturing market share thanks to a development community interested in working with it rather than against a closed system.

HP has announced that the transformation of WebOS would be made with the release of Open WebOS 1.0 by September 2012. The company has released a calendar detailing the different steps that will be taken to assure this transformation, with this starting in January with the provision of the new Enyo 2.0 development environment (and its source code) which will allow applications to be created which run independently of their environment – be it WebOS, iOS, Android or even web browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. The theme of this release is "write once, run everywhere".

The Enyo 2.0 source code is delivered under the Apache 2.0 license, which will also be the model selected for Open WebOS 1.0. The advanced program looks challenging over the coming months with the support of widgets, the addition of diverse libraries and a specific WebKit that is HTML5, Silverlight and Flash compatible via plug-ins to be released along with the management of a new Linux kernel.