In addition, we are pleased to announce early delivery of the System Manager Bus (which was originally scheduled for July) and a release of three policy components based on our Platform Portability Layer. We’re happy to be ahead of schedule in getting this component of the Open webOS platform into your hands.

Node.js is a JavaScript platform for deploying event-driven applications. It also forms the backbone for writing services in Open webOS. The code available from this release includes the bindings necessary to access the System Manager Bus.

The System Manager Bus, also known as Luna-service2, implements the Inter-Process Communications (IPC) mechanism used by Open webOS. Included with the release are utilities for monitoring and debugging. More information is available here. We were pleased to have this piece ready ahead of schedule so we’re making it available to the community.

The three system policy components included in this release are Powerd, Sleepd, and Storaged. Each is implemented using our Platform Portability Layer and demonstrates how to interface to system devices. More information is available on the Systems Policy Components page.

The Enyo team has been hard at work. This latest release of Enyo includes a number of new features including the new List widget. Also, the Ares 2 repo is now public. Head over to enyojs.com for more on both Enyo and Ares.

Finally, as with other Open webOS components, you can find all the source online and detailed information at the project Web site. Keep the feedback, pull requests, comments, and ideas coming. Open webOS is already a better platform from the contributions the community has made!

The Linux Foundation has completed the Android mainlining, and LSK3.3 will support all Android drivers as well as traditional Linux Drivers. We expect to see other companies adopt this kernel as the standard.

In conjunction with this, we are releasing today our platform portability layer, code-named “Nyx Project” which will work with the new LSK. We are also releasing this week our USB extensions and graphics extensions. Next week, we plan to go public with our LevelDB integration. We’ll have more information on that when it goes out.

In administrative news, we are naming Damian Kowalewski leader of the Project Management Committee for our Core OS project.

And with that,  we will have met our roadmap commitments for March.

We are also excited to announce a new website dedicated to Open webOS, openwebosproject.org. We will soon host a new blog on that site, and you can look for subsequent blog posts from me there.

Sam

We are publishing this legacy code to provide members of our community around the globe the ability to work with legacy devices using the current platform. One of our core values is that as many components of future and legacy operating systems should be open to the community. We value the contributions the webOS community has made over the past few years, and hope that this additional release will help you better understand the platform and create a constructive environment for moving forward as Open webOS itself is released.

On a scheduling note, we have also been informed that the Linux 3.3 kernel has produced a seventh release candidate. There have been many patches in the area of networking, drivers, management, and memory, and it looks like it may be ready for release by the end of the month. We will stick to our schedule of releasing our abstraction layer and components in the next few days in anticipation of the release of Linux 3.3. You should be able to work with it on any standard Linux kernel (e.g., Ubuntu or Debian-based) for now.

We remain committed to the Open webOS roadmap and are very pleased by the community interest we’ve seen so far. Thanks for your continued support!

Have you signed up yet for the March 4th Enyo Virtual Hackathon? There will be live physical presences in NYC (hosted at Pivotal Labs’ NYC headquarters), Dallas, Indianapolis, San Diego, and Oklahoma City, but you can also participate virtually from anywhere! Should be a great time. Big thanks to the NYC webOS Developer/Enthusiast Meetup group for putting it together. Awesome job, guys!

The most important news is that we are expanding the QtWebKit framework to incorporate OpenAL Soft (a 3D audio API), the OpenGL ES and WebGL graphics libraries, and GStreamer for handling streaming media. As we move webOS to the next generation, we’ve chosen these class-leading components to give our developers the ability to provide their apps with the most immersive and robust graphics and audio.

We are also announcing our integration with the Linux Standard Kernel, version 3.3. We will provide a hardware abstraction layer, called “Nyx”, which will give access to layers not available through the standard driver set.

Next, we will be introducing the fast and efficient LevelDB as our database engine. Developers will continue to use the MojoDB (DB8) abstraction layer to access database functionality; this will be released in March as well.

Toward the end of the month, we plan to release Novacom, which allows for USB communication and debugging with webOS devices. We know a lot of you in the developer community have been eager to get your hands on this. Enjoy!

I’ll post again soon to keep you apprised of our progress.

Sam

Today I am proud to announce delivery of our February Open webOS commitments: extensions to QtWebKit, the release of Isis (our web browser), our integration with JavaScript core, UI Enyo widgets (to be released at the end of February), and our governance model.

The web increasingly provides the best option for cross-platform development. It continues to be rapidly adopted and improved upon by a wide variety of platforms. Developers look to standards-based web development as a way of deploying across the mobile landscape, maximizing the potential market. We’re seeing proof of that with the adoption of Enyo, which has been downloaded 40,000 times in only three weeks. With today’s release, webOS remains at the forefront of this emerging standard.

With the power of the components released today, a developer can create an immersive user environment that can be built on any web platform. This is another step in fulfilling the promise of Open webOS.

Isis (webOS Browser) and QtWebKit

To stay at the forefront, webOS required a fast, standards-compliant web browser engine to provide the core of both the standalone browser and the rendering technology for the platform and its apps. For this reason, we chose QtWebKit to power the next generation experience for webOS. QtWebKit offers unrivaled speed and standards compliance while providing a powerful and fast platform for Enyo and apps. WebKit is also the point of integration between the underlying System Manager, which will be open sourced later this year, and the web rendering layer of webOS.

QtWebKit (a.k.a. “Cute” WebKit) was originally open sourced by Nokia. We have been in the process of moving webOS to this port of WebKit for some time, with a goal of increasing web site compatibility and overall performance. Today we are ready to release the first part of this effort to the open source community—the Isis web browser.

We’ve benchmarked the new Isis webOS browser and have found it to be extremely responsive compared to other browsers made for general consumption. It has a fast render pipeline and JavaScript execution profile, which is critical to Enyo and other web technologies. It is extensively supportive of HTML5 and CSS3. Standards-compliance is important to developers because they can use technologies like Enyo to develop cross-platform web applications that already work well on webOS.

We are also providing enhanced support for legacy products like Adobe Flash and other Netscape Plug-in API (NPAPI) plugins to allow them to run in non-X11 environments. In combination with the rest of webOS, we will be providing a complete browsing experience that can be deployed on mobile devices and other form factors.

Stay tuned for future webcasts, videos, and technical documentation on these developments. We have a number of exciting things planned as we continue the march to Open webOS.

Project information and the technical documentation for this release will be made available on GitHub and the project site, www.isis-project.org, by Leonid Zolotarev.

Sam

Editor’s note: You can find Sam’s blog post outlining the webOS governance model here.

Key Principles

• Open webOS will made available under the Apache license, Version 2.0.
• Open webOS will use the contributor committal model in use on most open source projects.
• Open webOS will be segmented into multiple projects to give developers ample opportunity to join and remain active in the development effort.
• The Open webOS project website will host a wiki, a source code repository, a mailing list, and a bug tracking system.
• We will use Github or an equivalent tool to as the code repository.
• We will use JIRA or an equivalent tool to track issues.
• Our plan is to allow multiple committers to branch and merge code in the open to allow multiple development branches to occur at once.

Organization

As noted above, Open webOS includes several projects: Enyo (a JavaScript framework), WebKit/Isis, the Linux Standard Kernel, and the webOS System Manager. Each project has a Project Management Committee (PMC), comprised of committers elected within the project’s community to provide oversight for the project. The PMC also decides on the project’s release strategy and is responsible for releasing distributions into the community.

PMC members are expected to act individually, making decisions in the best interests of the project, when acting on PMC or development lists. Each PMC is responsible for ensuring their project follows certain core requirements set by the board or other corporate officers of Open webOS. Examples include following legal, branding, and infrastructure related requirements, and ensuring their community operates in a manner similar to that outlined by the Apache Way.

PMC members nominate new contributors to the project as committers, and PMC members cast votes on electing new committers to the project. PMC members also have binding votes on any project matters.

Contributions

In the beginning, all committers (distinct from public users and contributors) will come from HP. The PMCs will use a system of meritocracy as a guide for adding contributors as the project progresses. The path of progressing from public user to contributor to committer is based largely upon user involvement in the community (see below). At any given moment we would expect relatively few committers.

(As an example, Linux has thousands of users, of whom only 2.5% are developers or contributors and fewer than 100 are committers. So, the project may have many, many users, but it’s the PMC and the committers who determine the project’s baseline.)

All committers report to the PMC of the component they represent. The PMC uses a consensus-based decision making process to determine whether or not to take a contribution from the community and commit it to the code tree.

Meritocracy criteria include:

• Community involvement
• Consensus decision-making
• Open and transparent communications
• Responsible oversight with deference to the community

Project Leaders

Today we are announcing the leaders of each PMC. The Open webOS board will be announced in April.

Sam

Editor’s note: You can find Sam’s blog post discussing our release of the Isis web browser and QtWebKit here.

After catching our breath from the first of many open source releases of webOS, we needed to get back to work to deliver on our commitments for February.

A key part of those commitments, as we shared in our roadmap, are extensions to QtWebKit. We are very fortunate to have a great WebKit team, led by Leonid Zolotarev. You will see an enhanced QtWebKit, a first look at the webOS governance structure (which will based on Apache methodologies), as well a few additional surprises, in the February release.

Last week, I had the opportunity to meet with our Developer Relations team. I am very pleased by their level of enthusiasm, and their dedication to the developer community. Like the rest of the team, they want to make an open webOS pervasive in the market, and they understand that our developer community is key to making this happen.

We are also very excited by the work that Rod Whitby and the homebrew community are doing porting Enyo 1.0 to legacy products. I also want to thank all of the developers who have submitted their Enyo-based applications to other platforms! You are really helping to get the word out. Developer adoption of Enyo has been phenomenal, and we expect it will only increase after our upcoming 2.1 and 2.2 releases.

Some of you may have seen the announcement that Bill Veghte has been named Chief Strategy Officer of HP. That’s important to know, because one of the teams he will be overseeing is the webOS group. He has already jumped right in, and is proving to be a great coach. We are learning from Bill’s past experience running Windows and Microsoft Live, and he is learning from our team’s expertise in open source, which has made this process rewarding for everyone involved. Bill is extremely enthusiastic about this effort and his guidance will be key to helping us along the path to success.

I am truly gratified to be leading the technical effort here in Sunnyvale. The excitement is growing throughout the team, and I’m convinced that the fun is only beginning!

Sam

In December, HP announced that webOS would be made available under an open source license, with continued support from HP. We’re proud of webOS and its potential to harness web standards to improve the next generation of applications, web services, and devices.

Today, we’re taking the next step on this journey by releasing Enyo, our JavaScript app framework, under open source licensing, allowing developers to distribute their Enyo-based webOS apps across other platforms. In this post, we’ll also provide a first look at our open source release roadmap.

In any large project, it’s imperative to communicate the plan for achieving the project’s goals. This plan is usually presented in the form of a roadmap, which outlines the steps necessary to achieve project goals and shows the path forward. For an open source project to be a success, that roadmap must be public so all contributors have a sense of where the project is headed.

In subsequent posts, and on the new Enyo website, we will share more details about our roadmap for webOS, including our plans for release phases, governance, tools, documentation, and more. So with that in mind, let’s step into an overview of some of the pieces of the release plan.

Our first contribution is Enyo, our lightweight, cross-platform framework aimed at mobile devices and web browsers.

This initial open source release includes Enyo 1.0, which allows current developers of Enyo apps for webOS devices to distribute their apps to other platforms. While this release is not intended to be expanded any further, there is considerable utility for our current developer base in releasing it.

Today’s release also includes the core of Enyo 2.0, which will be the foundation for Enyo going forward. It expands Enyo’s “write once, run anywhere” capability to even more platforms, from mobile devices to desktop web browsers. It works on many of the most popular web browsers, including Chrome, IE 9, Firefox, and Safari.

While 2.0 does not yet include any UI widgets, the core will support a wide variety of libraries and add-ons. A UI widget set for 2.0 will be released in the near future.

Upcoming releases include our distribution of WebKit, which will support not only HTML5, but also Silverlight and Flash through the use of plug-ins. It will enable the rendering of webpages to HTML Canvas and 3-D textures, and will support a wide range of application interfaces, including multi-touch.

We will also release a new kernel based on the Linux Foundation’s standard kernel. As we continue through the roadmap, you will see enhanced integration with JavaScript through register callbacks and custom multi-process architecture for security, load balancing, and recovery availability.

Look for us to introduce LevelDB to replace our prior database.

Along the way, we will also share our tool sets, and we expect that many of you will want to share yours as well.

In closing, I want to thank the great engineers who have worked with me on creating the open webOS roadmap and let you all know that we look forward to collaborating with the community. As my friend Eric Raymond stated as I embarked on the open source adventure, “It takes a village to create a complete solution.”

With this announcement, Meg Whitman has reiterated HP’s commitment to webOS as a cloud-connected, scalable platform, while opening up new possibilities for platform expansion and improvement. She has also committed HP to a course of continued improvement to webOS, which means we’re in it for the long haul. Finally, we are committed to good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation of the platform.

Here in Developer Relations, we have the deepest appreciation for you, our developer community. You have helped to bring this announcement about through your passion and commitment, through periods of both promise and uncertainty.

We are committed to you as not only contributors to our app ecosystem, but now to webOS itself. We recognize that there’s a larger open source community of which we will now be a part, and are excited by the future now open to us.

We also know you’ll have a lot of questions, and we don’t have all the answers right now. We will keep you up-to-date on the latest developments, both in the forums and here on the developer blog.

We hope you’ll join us for the next leg of this journey!