Hewlett-Packard makes webOS mobile software public

Hewlett-Packard said Friday it is making the webOS operating system for mobile devices it acquired from Palm last year available to the open source community. HP will continue to develop and support webOS, but the software platform will become open source, meaning that developers anywhere can tinker with it as they wish and it will be available for anyone to use free of charge. "WebOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable," HP chief executive Meg Whitman said in a release. "By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices," Whitman said. Palo Alto, California-based HP announced in August it would stop making smartphones and tablet computers using the webOS software acquired from Palm in a $1.2 billion deal last year. HP, citing disappointing sales, announced on August 18 it was discontinuing the TouchPad, a tablet computer powered by webOS, just seven weeks after it hit the market. Two weeks later, HP said it planned one last production run of the TouchPad, which became a hot seller following a price cut from $499 to just $99 and the announcement that it was being abandoned. TouchPad was the top-selling tablet computer in the United States after Apple's iPad in the first 10 months of the year, market research company NPD Group reported last month.