HP webOS: now open source

For those of you who are still shedding tears over the death of HP’s webOS devices and worrying about the future of the webOS operating system, there’s hope: HP has officially announced it will be contributing webOS to the open source community. This won’t mean a lot to consumers at first, but open-source enthusiasts are probably in cloud nine right now as they will have access to the full source code of webOS. This means that they will have an opportunity to use and modify the operating system with their own tweaks, hacks, and modifications.

With webOS now open source, this also means that other device manufacturers will be able to pick up the operating system and create webOS devices themselves (which should be interesting to see, and probably a good idea if Android somehow gets sued to death, although it seems very unlikely).

Giving webOS to the open source community is probably the only way that the platform could survive, but for how long? That is the question. HP has mentioned that it will be an “active participant and investor”, and will help govern the operating system to avoid problems like fragmentation in the future. So we’ll just have to see how long the company sticks around to offer its support. How many of you are excited over this news?? [HP Developer Blog | Press Release]

George Wong
Categories: Cellphones, Tablets
Tags: HP, open source, webos