On 9th December 2011, HP announced to make its highly talked about webOS open source. This announcement meant that anybody (individual developer or company) can use webOS and/or make changes to it. This came as a major success for the open source community that is hit by baseless allegations that professional companies or big corporates are neither interested in adopting nor interested in making their software open source.  To read more on why big companies are embracing open source, read an article here.

From HP's official news release :

HP will make the underlying code of webOS available under an open source license. Developers, partners, HP engineers and other hardware manufacturers can deliver ongoing enhancements and new versions into the marketplace. HP will engage the open source community to help define the charter of the open source project under a set of operating principles:

• The goal of the project is to accelerate the open development of the webOS platform
• HP will be an active participant and investor in the project
• Good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation
• Software will be provided as a pure open source project

HP also will contribute ENYO, the application framework for webOS, to the community in the near future along with a plan for the remaining components of the user space.

HP also planned to keep the existing team for webOS on board giving an idea that the company is really serious regrading the webOS software. The company also said that it will keep investing huge bucks in webOS clearing off all the speculations and doubts when HP announced that it will scrap all the products on webOS. Though things looked positive but still there were questions as to whether HP would be able to keep its promise in long run.

 

Cut to October 2012, HP releases first version of webOS named webOS 1.0. This gave a bright new ray of hope that the open source webOS project is still alive. The webOS1.0 release was followed by hiring reports for webOS by HP for its offices in China and US. This brought in a huge cheer and a thumbs up for HP from open source community HOP.

Here is an Open webOS Demo on HP TouchSmart PC ->