Word has leaked of an all-hands meeting at HP tonight, where CEO Meg Whitman will announce the fate of webOS. It’s no surprise to hear that HP is considering selling webOS — there had been rumblings as far back as August that, despite HP’s claims to the contrary, webOS would go on the block. What is surprising are the identities of a few of the potential buyers. According to Reuters, interested parties include Amazon, IBM, Intel, Oracle, and Research In Motion (RIM).

Of the five, Amazon seems by far the most likely candidate that might actually ship a competitive webOS product. The upcoming Kindle Fire is based on Android, but Amazon has done a great deal of work to customize the OS for its own use and avoid the patent infringements that have tangled Samsung and HTC in a web of litigation. Any attempt to move to webOS would require a significant amount of additional work, but there’s no reason Amazon couldn’t develop a future webOS product alongside a second-generation Kindle Fire based on Android.

Intel and RIM are two companies that could potentially leverage webOS in shipping products, but seem unlikely to do so (albeit for very different reasons). Intel could certainly bankroll the development of its own OS, but the CPU giant has never shown any particular interest in launching such a costly endeavor. The open-source nature of both Tizen (MeeGo’s replacement) and Android allows Intel to contribute to both projects and support its own developer communities without taking on the tremendous burden of building and maintaining the entire operating system. Windows 8 is only a year away, and while that may be a virtual eternity in Wall Street Standard Time, it would take Santa Clara at least that long to adapt webOS to its own uses.

As for RIM, the company is sinking fast. Recent service outages critically damaged the company’s credibility with its business customers at a time when loyal business customers are its only asset. RIM recently demoed its upcoming BlackBerry 8 OS, which is based on QNX, but also gave notice that the PlayBook now won’t receive a native mail client until Q1 2012. Given that email and messaging are at the heart of BlackBerry devices, the company’s failure to deliver such basic functionality until yearly a near after launch says volumes about its ability to develop successful products. Buying webOS would only undermine investor confidence further as it would leave RIM looking schizophrenic and unable to execute a coherent strategy.

That leaves IBM and Oracle, both of whom are almost certainly interested more in webOS’s patents than in webOS itself. The OS is considered to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars; HP won’t get its $1.2B purchase price back, but should be able to recoup 40-60 percent of that investment. The bigger question is why HP would choose to sell the OS if other companies are so interested in acquiring its patents, but CEO Meg Whitman may believe it’s best to dispose of the entire white elephant rather than spending further resources attempting to negotiate cross-licensing deals.

We’ll know more after tonight’s meeting. HP executives have previously implied that the company might even decide to build more webOS-based products, but that seems an unlikely outcome. webOS may still be intrinsically valuable, but Whitman has shown little interest in launching a new hardware initiative in the tablet/smartphone market so soon after abandoning the last one.