WebOS to go completely open source by September

Now there’s great news for the HP TouchPad users, as recently HP has announced release its WebOS mobile operating system as open source software. They are believed to release it by September 2012.

They will be using a standard Linux kernel instead of a custom kernel; they will also update the development tools for WebOS and release a beta version of Open WebOS in August.

The WebOS platform was initially developed by Palm for use on Smartphones. As later HP acquired the Palm for $1.2 billion, they created a version of the Operating System for the tablets and later launched it with the TouchPad in the summer of 2011.

But due to low sales HP decided to stop production of their TouchPad model and this also made the WebOS a lame platform for a while. But as HP announced to make the WebOS an open source platform rather than selling or licensing the software to another company, it leaves a hope for future HP WebOS products. This also leaves a door open for using the WebOS by other tablet manufacturers as Android platform.

HP is releasing Enyo under an open source license that is a JavaScript application framework, which developers can use to write applications for WebOS. They already released the 1.0 versions of the Enyo and also the core of Enyo 2.0.

The tools for creating the WebOS applications are similar to the tools use for creating the web applications. Enyo 2.0 also allows developers to write cross-platform applications that can run both on the WebOS and web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 9 and even Safari.

However, the exact situation after making it open source cannot be easily predicted. Earlier, we have seen the Symbian mobile OS used by Nokia taking a similar approach earlier, but is now a pretty dead platform. 

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