Open webOS 1.0 is ready

Having released the beta version in late August, HP has now made version 1.0 of the touch-optimised Open webOS open source operating system available as source code under the Apache Licence 2.0. Open webOS 1.0 includes the core components of WebOS, but it also incorporates the platform-independent Enyo 2 JavaScript application framework that was developed as part of the webOS project. The package also includes build scripts for Linux and OpenEmbedded.

According to chief architect Steve Winston, Open webOS is now ready to be ported to new devices. In a video, the developers demonstrated a port to HP's TouchSmart AiO PC, which Winston said only took the HP engineers a few days to create.

Open webOS on an HP TouchSmart All-in-One PC

Source code for Open webOS is available on the project's Github repository. For their next steps, the developers plan to modernise the mainly web-technology-based foundations of Open webOS, updating to Qt5, WebKit2, the BlueZ Bluetooth stack and the ConnMan network manager. An improved rendering architecture is also planned for the Luna system manager.

It is already known that Open webOS is not designed to run on old WebOS devices – these devices are not compatible with Linux kernel version 3.3 and also require various proprietary drivers. Getting Open webOS to run on the old HP devices is a task for the WebOS Ports team, which has already released TouchPad extensions that are based on the webOS Community Edition (LunaCE). Unlike HP's video, the Ports team's video also shows an early Open webOS port to an actual mobile device, the Galaxy Nexus.

An early Open webOS port to the Galaxy Nexus

The Ports team has so far not released any details about the port, but promised to update the official wiki as soon as the code has matured.

(djwm)