In December 2011, HP made the headlines with the webOS open source software that a lot of industry analysts thought it had great potential. But, back then the company was still working out the details. According to a recent press release, HP will release webOS fully open source by September this year.
The press release from HP writes that the company will commit webOS to open source by fall 2012. “The company aims to complete this milestone in its entirety by September” and has started on January 25th to execute “its plan to deliver an open webOS by committing to a schedule for making the platform’s source code available under an open source license”.
Bill Veghte, executive vice president and chief strategy officer, HP, declared: “HP is bringing the innovation of the webOS platform to the open source community”. He continued saying that for HP releasing the webOS platform 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”.
In August, an open webOS beta version will be released, but that still had developers anxious to work with the platform complain it takes too long. On webOS Nation forum, one member writes: “seems like a really long time to do this. HP should have hired more people”. Others feel that the company should really take its time with developing the platform. “I would rather them take time and get it right, than rush something out the door and mess up” explained another member of the forum.
HP explained for Mashable that it has a “full development staff on it”. The “1.0 September is just the beginning. We’re going to be collaborating with the community. But it’s tough to speculate. We want webOS to take on a life of its own, and there’s no better way to do that than open-sourcing it”.
For now the new version of “acclaimed Enyo developer tool and source code” are available. According to the press release, Enyo 2.0 is a tool that will enable “developers to write a single application that works across mobile devices and desktop web browsers, from the webOS, iOs and Android platforms to the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers”.
