There have been many a rumour about the fate of HP’s WebOS over the last few months; but those rumours can be put to rest, as HP has decided that the operating system that features on devices such as the Pre, Pixi and TouchPad will be contributed to the open source community.
HP say that the company will be an “active participant and investor in the project” with the goal of accelerating development of the OS. Basically, it would seem that HP do not want to pump in the time or money to make the operating system as competitive and they would like – so its resorted the open source community to make that happen.
There has been speculation as to whether HP may produce new hardware to support the newly-opened operating system. But most probably, HP are hoping that some other hardware manufacturer will produce products to run WebOS.
If you’re interested, HP has posted a set of FAQs about the announcement, which explains about the open source license and what impact (if any) it has on current owners of WebOS devices. But to be honest, it can’t really be bad news for anyone who happens to have a WebOS device – at least you know that you’ll continue to receive software updates and improvements in the future.
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