LG Announces webOS Open-Source Edition

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 19 March 2018 at 08:00 AM EDT. 10 Comments
OPERATING SYSTEMS
What was Palm webOS nearly a decade ago is seeing its latest incarnation as LG webOS Open-Source Edition.

The interesting history of webOS continues... While you probably recall HP acquired Palm in 2010 and with that there was webOS on the HP TouchPad. Around 2012 is when HP then announced they would publish the webOS source code as "Open webOS". WebOS was then acquired by LG Electronics where it's been in use for a few years now for smart TVs, IoT, and other LG devices. There's also been a few offshoots over the years like LuneOS as a fork of webOS.


While LG continues to deploy products with webOS, we haven't heard much of webOS in recent times... But today they announced the webOS Open-Source Edition akin to Open webOS back during the HP days.

LG in cooperation with South Korea's NIPA government agency are working on making webOS suitable as a more open platform with open connectivity. They are still looking to commercialize it as an open-source platform, LG announced this morning.


The webOS Open-Source Edition is hosted at webOSOSE.org. The source is on GitHub with its many different components. There doesn't appear to be any binary releases for any devices at this time. It will certainly be interesting to see if this webOS Open-Source Edition achieves anything meaningful or is just yet another chapter in the long webOS story.
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