HP is one company that has been suffering over the last two or three years. The company (although has high PC, sales revenues) continues to witness plummeting numbers. The company was forced into dropping its tablet plans, which was the best selling tablet (after Apple’s coveted iPad of course). The tablet was powered by HP’s unique web Operating System, which was believed to the reason behind the tablet’s sales numbers.
Although HP’s top level management had decided to drop both the tablet and the WebOS project, the company eventually decided to make product open source. Months after HP made this announcement to encourage investors; the beta version of the open source platform is now out.
HP released two exclusive versions of the WebOS. The first of the two, called the desktop build is the ideal development environment for designing WebOS user experience which adds a lot to the user experience and also helps in the integration of different open source technologies on Ubuntu or Linux desktop. There are several additions which include support for Calendar and Contacts under the core apps category and also support for third part Enyo apps. The second of the two is the OpenEmbedded build which fundamentally deals porting distribution on the WebOS.
The build is also equipped with an ARM emulator that will aid in the functioning of db8 and node.js services. HP added that OpenEmbedded was included as a result of its widespread community adoption and the support it offers in the form of cross-compiling on embedded platforms. Looking at the broader picture we see that the open version of the WebOS has more than 450,000 lines of code under an Apache 2.0 license. Also, the beta release has a total of 54 WebOS components under open source.
HP did not get the best response when it announced the open source version of the WebOS last year. The reasons pitted against HP on this issue were that the company didn’t provide a clear plan on how the platform will serve in the future. Also, the platform received a lot of criticism because there was a lot of uncertainty on how it would affect the mobile spectrum in total. As a result of these developments, HP announced a few more details in January, in which they announced that the first release of the OS will take place in September. HP is yet to provide an exact date for the release of the Open WebOS.
