It has been a long and arduous road for webOS. The operating system that was once heralded as the savior of the dying Palm product line nearly almost died itself. But HP is attempting to breathe new life into webOS, and that began with the release of its code under an open source license. The newest build, now in Beta, is available for developers to test and contribute code.

One of the useful features of this release is that developers can run it from the desktop, specifically within Ubuntu, which like webOS, is based on the Linux kernel and is open source. Alternatively, developers can run webOS on OpenEmbedded, an open source framework for embedded Linux, ideal for mobile architecture, such as ARM processors, which runs from any Linux distribution.

The beta release of webOS is made up of 54 open source components, 450,000 lines of code, and is available under the Apache 2.0 license to encourage both community and commercial contributions. HP is encouraging community developers to get involved in the process through its public Jira bug-tracking system, its Github repository, mailing list, IRC channels, and social media. HP is currently looking for OS core developers, app developers, and system UI, Webkit, and Qt developers. It also encourages end users to contribute to documentation, testing, bug submissions, and feature requests.

Palm developed webOS in 2009 with the goal of replacing its aging Palm OS. Its first webOS-based device, the Palm Pre was a smartphone designed to compete with the best of the market, including the iPhone. While the OS received rave reviews, many considered the hardware to be underpowered and almost toy-like compared to other smartphones in its price range.

In 2010, HP acquired Palm, and it soon became clear that its intentions were to strip down the old company and retain only its webOS software. HP subsequently released its own tablet, the HP TouchPad, which lasted only a matter of months before being discontinued. In 2011, HP announced that it would release webOS under an open source license, and development has continued ever since.

The desktop code for webOS is available for building on Ubuntu Linux 11.04 and 12.04 in 32-bit mode only. 64-bit architecture is currently not working. Interested users or developers can build it using HP’s desktop build script.