The much-praised webOS smartphone and tablet operating system is being released into the wild and is going open source. It means other manufacturers and developers can take the OS and change it to suit their needs without paying licence fees.
web OS owner, HP, has made the decision in the hope the operating system can be as successful as Google's open source Android OS.
HP, which acquired webOS in a $1.2 billion purchase of Palm in 2010, had been trying to figure out how to recoup its investment after a failed foray into the smartphone and tablet market.
HP Chief Executive Meg Whitman said the company looked at a number of options for webOS, including a sale and shut down of the division.
(Source: Reuters)The technology giant will make webOS available under an open source licensing agreement, but it has still not hashed out the terms of the licensing deal it plans to offer.
There are a number of open source projects that can be used as examples for deciding the structure of licensing, including Android and browser Mozilla.
The company plans to solicit ideas from developers before deciding on the licensing terms, Whitman said.
"We like the adoption of Android. It's growing like wildfire with a big developer community and hardware community," Whitman said, adding that HP would like to avoid fragmentation of the software that currently plagues Android.
Whitman also said HP may get back into the consumer tablet market in 2013 but it will not be making any more smartphones.
The future of webOS had been in limbo since August after HP killed its flagship webOS-based TouchPad tablet following poor sales.
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