Open webOS delivers additional code, new Isis browser, and governance model

The webOS team inside HP had said that it planned to deliver more source code for Open webOS to the community roughly once a month when it first announced the project in January, and it’s making good on the February commitment today with the release of UI widgets for Enyo 2 (which had been missing from the initial code drop), the platform’s JavaScript core, and a new browser, Isis. Isis is definitely the focus of this month’s deliverables, underpinned by QtWebKit — originally open sourced by Nokia — which is an engine that the company says it has wanted to move toward “for some time.” webOS CTO Sam Greenblatt calls it “extremely responsive” when benchmarked against the competition, which is certainly critical to the success of a modern mobile browser.

On the governance side, HP has detailed how Open webOS will be managed. Initially — as you might expect — all individuals able to commit code to the trunk will come from inside the company, but it says it’ll use “a system of meritocracy” to add individuals from the community over time based on their level of involvement.

The moves come as HP hopes to deliver Open webOS 1.0 sometime around September, a stable, complete product that’s ready to be rolled out to existing webOS devices (the TouchPad, for instance) and to be used on any new hardware that OEMs and tinkerers can think to throw at it. In the meantime, it’ll be geared strictly at developers and contributors to the project.