Former Palm boss exits HP

FORMER Palm boss Jon Rubenstein has left his position at HP, the maker of expensive printer ink has confirmed.

The news, reported by our sister IT news web site V3, comes less than two years after HP bought Palm, the former gadget maker and owner of WebOS. HP recently decided to release WebOS, which it had kept going after the purchase, as open source. HP confirmed Rubenstein's departure.

Rubenstein, who also worked at Apple, was in charge of HP's mobile push. However, HP failed to make any real impact with its Pre smartphone or Touchpad tablet.

In August then CEO Léo Apotheker said that HP would drop all of its WebOS hardware.

Last week HP released its roadmap for making WebOS open source and promised 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.

Last week, HP 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.

Starting with the Enyo release, there will be a trickle of release landmarks between now and Autumn that will culminate in September with the release of Open WebOS 1.0. µ