In a HP development community blog post Wednesday, Sam Greenblatt, CTO and head of technical strategy for the open webOS project, outlined plans for the move from commercial platform to community development.
“We’re proud of webOS and its potential to harness web standards to improve the next generation of applications, web services, and devices,” Greenblatt wrote. “For an open source project to be a success, that roadmap must be public so all contributors have a sense of where the project is headed.”
Open source plans kicked off Wednesday with the updated release and website for Enyo, its JavaScript app framework under open source licensing, so that developers can distribute Enyo-developed apps to other platforms. Into the fall, HP plans a slew of releases for the open source webOS, including WebKit with support for HTML5, Silverlight and Flash, a new kernel based on Linux Foundation standards and the introduction of LevelDB to replace its existing platform database.
In December, HP announced it would not shutter webOS, but instead turn it over to an open source community. That move came less than two years after HP bought the operating system’s parent company, Palm, for $1.2 billion to make a move in the mobile device marketplace.
Justin Kern is associate editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
