HP Delivers Promise, Releases Open webOS Project

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Many, many months ago, we brought you news that HP took a good hard look at webOS, and decided that the only plausible direction to take it in was to make it open source. We may never say this again, but good call HP. Considering that most media outlets openly speculated about when webOS would be taken out of its misery, making it open source could very well be its last chance at being relevant. Well, the long wait is over, as HP has just launched the Open webOS Project.

HP has done quite a bit of work for OWOSP. According to the official Open webOS Project website:

It has taken a lot of hard work, long hours and weekend sacrifices by our engineering team to deliver on our promise and we have accomplished this goal.

The Beta release is comprised of 54 webOS components available as opensource. This brings over 450,000 lines of code released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community.

The launch page goes on to describe all the features and fun that developers have at their disposal. This includes not one, but two build environments and a plethora of other features. Some more include:

OpenEmbedded was a natural choice for many reasons:

Its widespread community adoption

Excellent cross-compiling support for embedded platforms

And support for multiple hardware architectures

Needless to say, this is exciting. While it’ll probably never reach the relevance or the popularity of Android, the idea of there being a second open source mobile OS to play with is pretty great. There could be some awesome development for webOS, and much of it could spill into Android territory if developers can get webOS running on Android devices. That would be a complete turn from the top thread in the webOS development and hacking forum, which deals with running Android on webOS. There are other possibilities as well, as our Portal Administrator Will Verduzco once pointed out:

Imagine an HTC HD2 capable of running 6 mobile OSes.

With this release, HP is hoping to bring back the dead. And for once, they are actually doing a good job of it. For more info, feel free to check out any of the links above, or you can always go to the OWOSP official website.