Open webOS Beta Goes Live - The UpStream

Open webOS Beta Goes Live

posted Saturday Sep 1, 2012 by Scott Ertz

Open webOS Beta Goes Live

I don't entirely know what to say about this. Last week, HP announced that they would be creating a webOS-based internal start-up, Gram. An ambitious idea, for sure, trying to breathe new life into Palm's baby through an internal revival. The big question that the announcement left us with was: what about the Open webOS Project?

Not to be outdone, HP's Open webOS Project, the decision to release webOS under the Apache license, made their own announcement. As was the original plan, webOS was to be released in Beta form by the end of August and that commitment was met. This week, the Open webOS Project released Open webOS Beta 1.0 to the masses.

So, what does Open webOS Beta 1.0 contain and how does it differ from the newly announced webOS derivative Gram? Hit the break for more details.

While Gram will be a finished, ready to implement OS for serious hardware partners, Open webOS is more of a development environment and playground. According to Open webOS Project,

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...

Today's release provides -not one- but two build environments.

Our 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.

Our OpenEmbedded build provides the ideal development environment for porting webOS to new and exciting devices.

So, what I take away from this is that Open webOS can run on a desktop with the intention of developing applications for the platform (and probably Gram). OpenEmbedded, on the other hand, sounds like a tool used for individuals to port webOS to their existing device or to prepare hardware for the final license release of Gram. It will be interesting to see how people try to implement webOS on devices. I've got a couple of devices lying around the office I would love to see webOS on (like the old FloTV devices).

Do you have any device projects you want to implement Open webOS into? Anyone going to try and port it to existing Palm/HP hardware? Let us know in the comments below.

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