Though Hewlett-Packard was unable to produce webOS devices that consumers were interested in buying — at a positive margin, at least — CEO Meg Whitman still thinks the beleaguered platform has legs. After unsuccessfully trying to sell or license webOS, HP decided late last year to donate its $1.2 billion platform to the open source community. The firm still plans to launch new webOS devices in the future, however, and Meg Whitman explained HP’s position while speaking with CRN. Read on for more. ...

HP cut its losses last month and announced the company’s webOS mobile operating system would move to an open source model. On Wednesday, HP released a roadmap detailing the open source future of webOS. The company said it expects the software to be fully open-sourced by September, at which point it will be known as Open webOS 1.0. “HP is bringing the innovation of the webOS platform to the open source community,” said Bill Veghte, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at HP. “This i...

During the Consumer Electronics Show, Samsung announced that the company is working on merging its Bada mobile operating system with the open-source Tizen operating system. “We have an effort that will merge bada and Tizen,” said Tae-Jin Kan, senior vice president of Samsung’s Contents Planning Team, in an interview with Forbes. While he wasn’t aware when the work would be complete, Kang indicated that is has already begun. Read on for more. (more…)

A new report has ranked Google’s Android operating system the most “closed” open source platform among eight major open source projects. VisionMobile on Monday published The Open Governance Index, a deep look at the relative openness of Android, Qt, Symbian, MeeGo, Mozilla, WebKit, Linux and Eclipse. Going beyond licensing models and using governance as a core metric, the firm determined that Eclipse is the most open open source platform with an Open Governance Index of 84% while Google&#...

Hewlett-Packard on Friday announced that is is contributing its webOS platform to the open source software community. The company confirmed that it would not build any new webOS hardware for the time being, though it said it would continue to actively develop and support the operating system. “WebOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable,” said HP CEO Meg Whitman in a statement. “By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the ...

Samsung will open its bada mobile operating system to other manufacturers and developers next year in an effort to “reduce its reliance” on Android, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. The South Korea-based company also hopes it can deploy bada on other devices, such as smart TVs. Samsung unveiled bada in late 2009 and has used the operating system on its Wave family of handsets. According to Gartner, bada currently has a 1.9% share of the mobile OS market. Samsung’s latest bada-pow...

Google has accused Microsoft of leaking “highly confidential source code” related to its open-source Android operating system. According to PaidContent, the search giant asked a federal United States International Trade Commission judge to sanction Microsoft after it spilled the beans on Google’s source code to a witness in Microsoft’s ongoing patent battle with Motorola. Reportedly, the witness, Dr. Robert Stevenson, has acted as a consultant for both HP and Microsoft, which Google vi...

Android may be an open source operating system, but it’s not as open as other platforms according to a new research report from VisionMobile. The research firm compared Android, Eclipse, Firefox, the Linux kernel, MeeGo, Qt and Symbian and found that, of those open source environments, Android was the least “open.” According to the report’s “open governance index,” which scored each environment on how open it is, Android scored a 23%. It was far below the others; Eclipse sc...

Nokia recently said that its Symbian operating system is no longer open source. The Finnish firm is continuing to provide source code to Japanese OEMs and its small developer community in an alternative “open and direct” model. “Consistent with this, the Nokia Symbian License is an alternative license which provides an access to Nokia’s additional Symbian development for parties which collaborate with Nokia on the Symbian platform,” Nokia stated. The Symbian Foundation opened up ...

In mid-July, Mozilla announced that it was upping its “bug bounty” from $500 to $3,000 for every critical, reproducible security flaw reported. Today, MacWorld is reporting that, “Between 10 percent and 15 percent of the serious security bugs reported since Mozilla launched its bug bounty program have been provided free of charge.” Mozilla spokesperson Johnathan Nightingale said: “A lot of people would say, ‘Don’t worry about it. Donate it to the EFF or just send me a T-shi...

Yay open source! Samsung has released the source code for the SGH-I897, better known as the Captivate (the AT&T variant of the Galaxy S). In a letter to developers Samsung writes:You can download the source code of SGH-I897 on this site in Mobile Category, SGH-I897 model.Thank you.The source is about 160 megabytes in size and available to all who want it, no signups necessary. Hit up opensource.samsung.com to download the goods![Via BriefMobile] (more…)

At the DROID X launch on Wednesday, Andy Rubin confirmed that Google is uploading the Android 2.2 source code to its Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository. With Froyo now in the hands of both the developer community and the OEMs, we can expect the latest Android OS to make its way onto handsets in the near future. While you wait for the manufacturers to get their official versions out in the upcoming weeks, keep your eyes open for those unofficial versions which will hit the Internet in the upcom...

As a part of its I/O 2010 keynote, Google has announced a new, open-source video format known as WebM. Based primarily on VP8, the royalty-free format also borrows from Matroska as well and Ogg Vorbis audio. Said to be efficient in its consumption of power and resources, Google is claiming WebM will work wonderfully on phones, tablets, netbooks and other portable devices. As of May 19th, all videos uploaded to YouTube shop in 720p and up will be encoded in WebM. Chrome, Firefox and Opera are the major browse...

Folks hoping for an Atom-powered Android smartphone have reason to rejoice, as Intel’s GM of software and services announced that not only has the chipmaking giant modified the open-source platform to play nice with its x86-based processors, but it already has customers interested in using the unique OS-chipset combination. While no further details were divulged, the same executive also mentioned the company is hard at work getting “enabling all OSes for Atom phones.” When Google first desig...