Just a month-and-a-half after announcing their intention to open source webOS, HP has now released a roadmap detailing exactly how that's going to happen. It's pretty ambitious, and coupled with the release of Enyo 2.0 will serve to make webOS a contender for the mobile open source crown.

A few notable changes will take place to make webOS both more accessible and more easily spread. The most fundamental is switching to the standard Linux kernel instead of rolling their own custom kernel. By using the standard kernel users will be able to (1) install webOS on so many things, and (2) have readily-available drivers to go with that kernel.

HP's also switching from using the Oracle Berkeley DB (an open source database library) to leveldb, another open source database library but this time from the folks at Google. The switch to leveldb was made for the sake of better support for CouchDB. Getting technical here (and admittedly over this blogger's head), but the switch is a good thing.

The roadmap plots out an path that should see webOS fully open sourced by the end of September 2012. HP says that they've worked closely with WebOS Internals chief Rod Whitby to refine the plan and incorporated much of his input on the open source initiative. Here's the roadmap as it stands today:

January: Enyo 2.0 and Enyo source code Apache License, Version 2.0

February: Intended project governance model, QT WebKit extensions, JavaScript core, UI Enyo widgets

March: Linux standard kernel, Graphics extensions EGL, LevelDB, USB extensions

April: Ares 2.0, Enyo 2.1, Node services

July: System manager (“Luna”), System manager bus, Core applications, Enyo 2.2

August: Build release model, Open webOS Beta

September: Open webOS 1.0

You'll notice that the roadmap says webOS 1.0 - that's not the old webOS getting released, that's the version counter getting reset for the new future of open source.

Full press release is after the break.