HP announced last week that it will keep its PC division instead of spinning it off as the company had previously discussed. The future of the company’s mobile strategy and the fate of the webOS platform remain unclear, however.

After HP acquired Palm last year, the hardware giant had big plans for Palm’s troubled mobile operating system. HP intended to expand the software beyond mobile devices and ship it on products ranging from desktop computers to printers. The company reversed course in August, announcing plans to discontinue production of webOS phones and tablets.

HP seemingly intended to sell off webOS. Due to the intrinsic technical value of the platform and the strategic value of the underlying intellectual property, a lot of speculation surfaced regarding potential buyers. So far, no deals have been announced and no companies have publicly expressed interest in taking over the platform.

Sources within HP recently told The Guardian that webOS development efforts are likely to be shut down in the near future and that HP personnel who are working on the platform could soon face a division-wide layoff. The once-promising operating system might not get an opportunity to live on under the stewardship of a new owner.

In response to rumors about imminent termination of the webOS group, HP senior vice president of operations Tony Prophet told GigaOm that the company is still investigating its options. He said that the company is subjecting webOS to the same kind of decision-making process that was used to determine the future of the PC group. This suggests that there is still a remote chance that webOS will have a future at HP.

The possibility of complete termination, however, still looms threateningly. Such an outcome would not benefit anyone. If no buyer can be found and HP doesn’t want to continue developing webOS itself, the company should consider opening the source code rather than simply shelving the platform. Although there would likely be some modest costs associated with undertaking the necessary relicensing effort, it would also have some major advantages.

Opening the source code would ensure that HP customers who purchased webOS devices won’t be left entirely in the cold. Community-driven development would be able to sustain the platform and ensure the availability of ongoing support in much the same way that the Cyanogen project and third-party ROMs continue to serve Android users long after their phones are no longer updated by the manufacturers.

The webOS platform is currently a mix of open source and proprietary software components. It makes extensive use of Node.js, an open source JavaScript engine based on Google’s V8 JavaScript runtime. The user interface is displayed with a standard HTML renderer. There is a lot of valuable software infrastructure in the webOS userspace stack, however, that is still closed. Opening up that code would be advantageous on several different levels.

The Enyo JavaScript framework, for example, could be useful to Web developers. Opening webOS could potentially open the door for creating a compatible application runtime environment that works on other operating systems—third-party webOS applications could then potentially be made to run in other environments. Other components of the webOS userspace stack might even be useful on the Linux desktop, which has some commonality with webOS at certain layers.

In cases where large-scale open source software projects are opened, there are almost always questions about the provenance of the code and whether all of it can legally be opened. In the case of webOS, there may be proprietary third-party firmware in the wireless radio drivers or other low-level components that HP can’t distribute under an open license.

The userspace stack, however, doesn’t seem likely to have such encumbrances—the truly unique parts of the platform were developed in-house and are almost certainly safe to open. If HP can open enough of the platform to facilitate the development of third-party ROM images for webOS devices, it would be a huge win for consumers and the open source software community.

HP would not have any difficulty finding a good home for webOS as an open source software project. The platform’s existing homebrew community, which operates the webOS Internals wiki and the Preware package management platform, could help coordinate the maintenance of webOS if HP were to open the platform and move on.

Mozilla, which is just starting to work on its own Web-centric mobile platform, might also be able to do great things with the webOS source code. Samsung and Intel also recently announced Tizen, a separate open source project for building a mobile platform around Web technologies. They might similarly be interested in picking up where HP left off with webOS.

Opening the platform and attracting some partners to do the heavy lifting on webOS development might even make it practical for HP to continue using webOS in some capacity—on printers, for example—in markets that are still a strong focus for the company.

Even if HP decides to keep webOS and move forward with the original plan to use it across a diverse range of products, the company could still benefit from opening certain components—particularly the JavaScript framework and the application runtime. Making those parts of the operating system useful and accessible to a wider developer audience could help attract third-party software to the operating system.

It’s clear that webOS could still do a lot of good in the right hands. If HP can’t find a buyer and doesn’t want to continue developing the platform entirely on its own, opening it up to the community could create some new opportunities and benefit existing consumers.