It has been up in the air on what the future of webOS was going to be, but today, HP has announced the platform will be open sourced. What this means is, webOS will be able to be installed on different hardware and other vendors will be able to do what they want with it.
HP will actively support webOS and push the development for the public to try and help make the platform successful, without putting in to much more money. Also, the patents for webOS will stay in control of HP to protect developers. There is no official word on whether HP will produce any more hardware for webOS or if they will leave it completely up to 3rd party vendors. We would not rule out the possibility though.
This is a pretty bold move, but it is really the only sensible move that HP could make, besides just killing the platform off completely. Maybe this won’t help webOS and it will eventually die completely, but hopefully some will use it and we will finally see the software and hardware progress.
(Via The Verge)
