In December 2011 HP announced that webOS, the OS featured on their failed HP TouchPad and HP Veer and Pre3, would be open sourced. Well today HP has revealed a timeline of when developers and people who want the OS will be able to get their hands on it.
By September, HP expects the entire project to be finished. Meanwhile, Enyo, a webOS application framework that made its debut with webOS 3 on the TouchPad, is available today, open sourced. As well as this, an update of Enyo 2.0 has also been released along with its source code. As The Verge points out, this shows that HP is making good on their promise to “be an active participant and investor in the project.”
There are plenty of other releases on the schedule, such as UI Enyo widgets and the switch to a regular Linux kernel, meaning wider hardware compatibility, as long as HP sticks to schedule.
Open webOS will be available for developers HP TouchPads later in the year, and HP is looking into putting Open webOS onto all webOS devices, including my Pre 2.
So will this see webOS compete with Android and iOS? Probably not. But it’s a big step into giving the OS a real ecosystem, even if it remains small. And who knows what company might actually start releasing some webOS phones or tablets.
