HP releases "Community Edition" of webOS as open source

Despite having shelved its webOS hardware months ago, HP continues to work towards finalising the open source version of its Open webOS mobile operating system by September. As part of this effort, HP has now cooperated with WebOS Internals developers to release further webOS 3.0.5 sources for the TouchPad as a "Community Edition" under the Apache 2.0 Licence. The final component required to compile an open source version of webOS was the Luna system manager (luna-sysmgr), which is now available to download as a 9MB source code archive.

A team of six WebOS Internals developers, led by Tom King (ka6sox), will provide support for the webOS Community Edition. The team goes by the name WebOS Ports and has set up a GitHub repository which, the developers say, contains everything that's required to create a bootable version of webOS.

With the release of the WebOS system manager, HP has even kept ahead of the roadmap schedule that was announced back in January; a beta version of Open webOS is scheduled to arrive in August, with Open webOS 1.0 due to be released in September. The final release will integrate more modern technologies than the current Community Edition – including the BlueZ Linux Bluetooth protocol stack and the GStreamer multimedia framework – to simplify porting the system to other types of hardware.

See also:

• Phoenix aims to rise from the webOS ashes, a report from The H.
• Enyo project says it's alive and well, a report from The H.
  
• Comment: Is webOS the new Plan B for mobile?, a feature from The H.

(crve)