webOS to Become Open Source

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HP has made its big announcement about webOS today. CEO Meg Whitman has promised definitive word about the fate of the mobile operating system, and the outcome might look promising. But did HP just give away a multi-billion investment for free?

webOS is not dead, and that’s something the technology media is quite sure of these days. News of webOS’ early demise had circulated when HP made a hasty announcement that it was pulling the plug off its PC and mobile businesses. However, the company had a management reorganization, and with Meg Whitman as the new president and CEO, the company has re-evaluated its options.

In an announcement today, Whitman shared with HP employees that webOS will be open-sourced as “the best way to ensure the benefits of webOS are accessible to the largest possible ecosystem.” She added that this will help “accelerate the open development of the webOS platform,” to which HP will be an active participant and investor.

HP is confident that releasing webOS as an open-source mobile operating system will ultimately be better for the company and for the developer community. Whitman added that “webOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable … By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices.”

Operationally, this also means that less manpower will be devoted to webOS, given that it will now be a community-driven effort (with HP being heavily involved still). The company is likely to move staff around, due to this development. Open-sourcing webOS will mean other companies can also build devices based on the platform, as well as contribute to development. As such, Android might have just found itself a worthy competitor in the open-source mobile OS game. Will brands like Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC, LG and the like adopt webOS?

Another question is whether HP just give away its investment in the operating system. The company spent $1.2 billion on webOS along with its Palm acquisition. By industry estimates, HP has also sunk about $2.1 billion in costs developing and selling its TouchPad tablets at a loss. There’s no word on how HP will earn from what is now essentially free, although with the $99 TouchPad sales resuming recently, it’s very likely that HP will resume production of tablets that run on their now open-source operating system.