When a product fails to meet expectations, what do we do with it? Pundits would tell you to Open source the software / hardware technology and let the contributors from around the globe innovate it.
Well, HP has opened up, as promised. They have Open Sourced WebOS 1.0 Beta to the community under proper Open source license.
According to HP,
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 Beta release is comprised of 54 webOS components available as opensource. This brings over 450,000 lines of code released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community.
Two Build Environments
HP has delivered two different build environments targeting different set of needs.
1. The desktop build provides the ideal development environment for enhancing the webOS user experience with new features and integrating state of the art open source technologies. Developers can now use all their desktop tools on powerful development machines.
This is the ideal, productive environment for OS developers to enhance the user experience and integrate other best-of-breed open source technologies. The desktop build supports running System Manager as an application on your desktop, and the Core Applications running within System Manager.
2. OpenEmbedded build provides the ideal development environment for porting webOS to new and exciting devices.
The environment provides with an ARM emulator, which runs core services like db8 and node.js. The OE Core image boots to System Manager and the full webOS experience.
OpenEmbedded is specially targeted at managing porting to multiple platform architectures, and is an ideal base for contributors interested in bringing Open webOS to new hardware. The Beta release opens our ongoing development branch targeting an ARM emulator.
All of these elements are now available in the build for Ubuntu desktops. The System Manager now has support for applications, including the Core Applications such as Calendar and Contacts, with their underlying Synergy services. 3rd party Enyo apps are supported as well.
These are visible in the github repos.
How to Contribute in WebOS Open Source
HP needs your help to mature the Beta state of the WebOS and work together to make the final production ready code. You can head over to community and join mailing lists to keep track of issues. QAs can contribute by filing bugs and feature requests to Jira system.
It doesn’t stop there, HP is even hiring, checkout their jobs page for a full list of open positions.
WebOS 1.0 Beta Development
Apart from making open sourced code better, HP is continuing to develop next set of features for its WebOS platform. Upcoming releases are bringing a huge list of new features including new Gestures and Card Stack Tabs.
HP is excited for the upcoming 1.0 release, and looking towards your contributions.
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I’ve loved WebOS and have owned a Palm Pixi Plus. I have always liked the way they handled multi tasking with their card view. Also interesting was the Gesture area and the slick gestures to switch between apps and going back and forth within apps. I hope it can be ported to Android via custom ROMS. I’d like to get a WebOS based custom ROM for
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