WebOS will be open sourced

For those of us who were Palm fans way back when there was no Android or iPhone, you may be interested to know that WebOS will be made open source.

WebOS is a Linux based mobile OS that was developed by Palm, poorly marketed, sold to HP and then poorly marketed again before they gave up.

Well, you’ve been waiting for the big webOS announcement, and today we’ve made it. This morning, HP announced that webOS will be going open source with the resources of HP behind it. The Developer Relations team is very excited by this announcement and what it means for the future of webOS, and for you, our developer community.
With this announcement, Meg Whitman has reiterated HP’s commitment to webOS as a cloud-connected, scalable platform, while opening up new possibilities for platform expansion and improvement. She has also committed HP to a course of continued improvement to webOS, which means we’re in it for the long haul. Finally, we are committed to good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation of the platform.
Here in Developer Relations, we have the deepest appreciation for you, our developer community. You have helped to bring this announcement about through your passion and commitment, through periods of both promise and uncertainty.
We are committed to you as not only contributors to our app ecosystem, but now to webOS itself. We recognize that there’s a larger open source community of which we will now be a part, and are excited by the future now open to us.
We also know you’ll have a lot of questions, and we don’t have all the answers right now. We will keep you up-to-date on the latest developments, both in the forums and here on the developer blog.
We hope you’ll join us for the next leg of this journey!

http://developer.palm.com/blog/2011/12/open-source/