HP has put up a press release regarding the fate of WebOS. WebOS has been given to the open source community.
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
This is probably the best thing that HP could have done with this. Once everything is finalized, it will then be possible for new handsets to be made by companies other than HP which I hope happens. As much as I like Android, I do think that WebOS is a very nice mobile OS that is just screaming to be put on some quality hardware.
What do you think? Will this help WebOS or will it limp along like OpenMoko? Will it even be able to compete with iOS and Android?