HP Releases More Details on the Open Sourcing of webOS

This morning, HP gave further details of its contribution of the webOs platform to the open source community. I find these details and the timeline associated with the release to be positive developments, both for Linux and for the wider mobile markets.

The WebOS stack represents a rich set of components that combined together create a comprehensive platform for mobile devices. The highlight of today’s announcement has to be the open sourcing of Enyo, the application framework for webOS. This is a powerful framework that app developers can use to build applications that will work across different platforms including iOS, Android, webOS and so on.

Companies announce open sourcing products and projects all the time. There are several decisions HP executives made in this process that I think signal they are on the right track:

• webOS is moving to the mainline Linux kernel. This saves any device maker service and support costs since it will eliminate much of the custom code those companies need to support. They have committed considerable resources to working with the upstream project, which will insure their Linux investment will last...