Open webOS reaches beta milestone: ‘we delivered on our promise’

The team responsible for open sourcing webOS — composed primarily of HP employees — has hit the beta milestone for Open webOS 1.0 today, which is on track with the schedule HP originally announced for the platform in January. Though there’s no specific hardware compatibility mentioned, we already have a sense of the plan here: the project is trying to align the kernel with Android’s so that it can draft off of hardware that’s been designed to run it. In the meantime, the package ships with an ARM emulator.

All told, Open webOS now has 54 open sourced components under its belt totaling some 450,000-odd lines of code. The original plan was to hit version 1.0 in September — but obviously, that starts tomorrow, and the team’s latest verbiage seems to be hedging a bit: “...with the September release we will announce our future plans for Open webOS.”