HP announces webOS to be open-sourced
I promised you last week that HP would be announcing their plans for the future of webOS in the weeks ahead. Well that day has come. HP announced today that it will be contributing it’s webOS software to the open source community.
This is great news for any fan of webOS. As you know from some of my other articles, I like webOS, but it just doesn’t have the apps to be as useful to me as Android is. This announcement could change all that. We could be seeing custom variations of the os put out by talented developers like CyanogenMod. Meg Whitman, CEO of HP, says “webOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable, and by contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices.” HP has claimed that they will be an active participant and investor in the project, and that they hope for “good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation.” They also plan to release the application framework called ENYO to the open source community in the near future.
While I know I immediately think of the great possibilities for my Touchpad, being a native webOS device, there other possibilities out there. Since this software is open source we could be seeing it made to be run on other, non HP devices. For example a developer could make a version of it to run on my HTC EVO if they wanted to. With webOS going open source, the possibilities are limitless, and I for one am looking forward to the future of webOS.
[HP]
