Go, and never darken my towels again - Groucho Marx
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HP clears the path for open sourced WebOS
TECHNOLOGY VENDOR HP has released its roadmap for making WebOS open source and is promising that it will be available in September.
The firm has wrestled with the operating system for a little while now, and it was only in December last year that it came to a decision about its future.
"WebOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable," said HP president and CEO Meg Whitman then.
"By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices."
Today the company provided a timeline for action and released the source code for version 2.0 of Enyo, the WebOS developer tool. This code, and WebOS itself, will be made available under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
"HP is bringing the innovation of the webOS platform to the open source community," said Bill Veghte, EVP and chief strategy officer at HP.
"This is a decisive step toward meeting our goal of accelerating the platform's development and ensuring that its benefits will be delivered to the entire ecosystem of web applications."
Poor WebOS has been living in limbo since ex-CEO Leo Apotheker announced plans to drop it and the firm's PC business, although he was always less sure about the latter.
Today we learn that starting with the Enyo release we will see a trickle of release landmarks between now and Autumn that will culminate in September with the release of Open WebOS 1.0. µ
Tags: Software
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I don't quite see how HP can release WebOS under the Apache License.
The WebOS kernel is essentially Linux 2.6, with a few patches. However, although the Apache License (V2) is compatible with the GPL V3 license it is _not_ compatible with the GPL V2 license and the Linux kernel is GPL V2.
Too bad that Palm and HP both dropped the ball with WebOS as i think they HAD a good thing, the OS was very nice, smooth even on the outdated hardware they attached it to. I Got a Palm Pre for my wife, who loved it but i just cannot believe that they screwed the pooch like they did, My guess now is that its probably too late to make a comeback and i dont see myself giving it a chance should vendors swarm to the open source OS with headsets because i've moved on and love the Android Devices available.
myself will join the community and because ain't bothered with all the rage stuff will patiently wait for a nice tablet running WebOS.
go HP go!