HP to make webOS fully open source by autumn


26 Jan 2012

Bill Veghte, executive vice-president and chief strategy officer, HP

Information technology giant HP is rolling out a road map for making webOS’ source code available under an open-source licence by September.

HP also announced it is releasing version 2.0 of webOS’ developer tool, Enyo.

Enyo 2.0 enables developers to write a single application that works across mobile devices and desktop web browsers, from the webOS, iOS and Android platforms to the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers, and more, HP said.

The source code for Enyo is available now.

“HP is bringing the innovation of the webOS platform to the open source community,” said Bill Veghte, executive vice-president and chief strategy officer, HP.

“This is a decisive step toward meeting our goal of accelerating the platform’s development and ensuring that its benefits will be delivered to the entire ecosystem of web applications.”

The webOS code will be made available under the Apache License, Version 2.0, beginning with the source code for Enyo.

During the first half of this year, HP will make individual elements of webOS source code available – from core applications like Mail and Calendar to its Linux kernel – until the full code base is contributed to the open source community by September.

HP’s schedule is as follows:

Timing Milestone/Code published
January Enyo 2.0 and Enyo source code
Apache License, Version 2.0
February Intended project governance model
QT WebKit extensions
JavaScript core
UI Enyo widgets
March Linux standard kernel
Graphics extensions EGL
LevelDB
USB extensions
April Ares 2.0
Enyo 2.1
Node services
July System manager (“Luna”)
System manager bus
Core applications
Enyo 2.2
August Build release model
Open webOS Beta
September Open webOS 1.0