You guys remember webOS, right? Well, the flatlined mobile operating system is ready to show some new life, as its parent company HP has announced the beta release of the open webOS. Not too long ago, we learned of HP’s plan to snub legacy devices under its new open mobile platform initiative for developers.
HP in a blog post explained the challenges it took to release the Open webOS beta saying, “it has taken a lot of hard work, long hours and weekend sacrifices by our engineering team to deliver on our promise and we have accomplished this goal.” The idea of this program is to court developers to write on the site devoid of any HP branding. Moreover, the company also mentioned that the beta release will pack 54 components available as open source, including some 450,000 lines of code under the Apache 2.0 license. The open platform will offer two different build environments: a desktop build and an OpenEmbedded build.
There’s no doubt that this is great news for webOS enthusiast out there. However, my question is, are there still enough developers out there interested in spending the time to build on a platform that seems to have no real future?
[via TechCrunch]