SAN JOSE, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard Co. will not sell the remnants of its Palm acquisition, instead making the webOS mobile operating system available to developers as an open- source platform.
HP chief executive Meg Whitman has been contemplating the fate of webOS, which powered the Palo Alto, Calif., tech giant’s short-lived foray into the tablet business with the TouchPad, since taking over in September. On Friday, the company announced it would release the technology to the open-source community.
“WebOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable,” 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.”
HP purchased Sunnyvale, Calif.- based Palm — which became famous for electronic organizers that were, in effect, early smartphones without the phone — for $1.2 billion in 2010. Since then, however, HP has failed to develop any webOS-based products that made a dent in the mobile market.
The TouchPad tablet was HP’s biggest launch using webOS, but it decided to end the product line two months after its launch, then proceeded to sell of most of its inventory at a loss, one of the final moves by former CEO Leo Apotheker before he was shown the door by HP.
