Hewlett-Packard bought out the struggling Palm, and its webOS operating system, in 2010 with the goal of entering the highly-competitive mobile market. The hardware giant put a lot of weight behind webOS under the leadership of former CEO Leo Apotheker, but once the keynotes were over and the devices hit the market it turned out that customers weren’t nearly as excited about webOS as HP itself.

The lack of demand from the market led to a few fairly predictable results. The engineers were laid off, followed by webOS head Sam Greenblatt, and as a last-ditch effort to realize some sort of value from its $1.2 billion investment, Hewlett-Packard open sourced the platform. Nowadays, that’s not working out too well either.

The reason for the newly open mobile operating system’s limited success is not because Open webOS lacks a community, but because Hewlett-Packard doesn’t seem to be all that interested in the project anymore. According to an entry  in the Open webOS official blog:

“For Open webOS we are aiming for support on future hardware platforms where SoC’s support Linux 3.3+ kernel and where open source replacements for proprietary components are integrated. Existing devices cannot be supported because of those many proprietary components, including graphics, networking and lack of drivers for a modern kernel (but of course, there is the Community Edition for those interested in improving the TouchPad).”

This is a big blow to the community simply because the TouchPad is the device that the webOS community is using. And adding insult to injury, Hewlett-Packard owns the ‘proprietary components’ that prevent the upcoming dull release from running on the tablet – it would be within the company’s to change that.

ZDNet’s James Kendrick also pointed out that while the lack of support for Linux 3.3 and above is indeed an obstacle, it has already been solved. Android supports the kernel and the webOS community has created a port for the TouchPad quite a while ago. Unfortunately, webOS might be headed for the same direction as its once great creator Palm.