Last month, Hewlett-Packard announced that it would release its webOS operating system as free / open source software after the debacle of the HP TouchPad (photo ©Tom Raftery) tablet in the last summer. Now HP has announced the roadmap for the development of Open webOS, the free version of that operating system under the Apache License 2.0, which should lead to the release of its version 1.0 in September 2012.
The Apache license is one of the most permissive and allows developers to combine code released under this license with the code they produce and to sell the resulting combination. It’s clear that HP wants to attract developers by allowing them to use their code very freely.
The first release, just happened, concerns version 2.0 of Enyo, the JavaScript framework to write cross-platform applications that run on different mobile devices and browsers. For the success of an operating system it’s essential to have as many applications as possible and for developers it’s certainly easier to develop applications that run under various operating systems.
Enyo, also released under the Apache 2.0 License, allows to develop applications not only for webOS – though we should start talking about Open webOS! – but also for iOS and Android. Applications written with Enyo 2.0 also run on ordinary desktop computers in browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and MSIE, thus giving developers a great opportunity to spread them around.
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Over the coming months a number of components will be released, some of which will replace the ones used in webOS. Something will change for the kernel, which will be the standard Linux one instead of custom one previously used. This should make it easier not only the development of Open webOS but also its porting and its installation on mobile devices from other manufacturers.
At this point, HP hasn’t announced when it intends to market a tablet with Open webOS, though HP CEO Meg Whitman already announced that project in last December, right after the announcement that webOS would be released as open source. Since those days however someone wondered if HP was too late to hope to enter a market where even Microsoft struggles to be a factor. The Open webOS project looks good and after the mistakes made HP seems to have taken a good path, so after all it could be successful.
