The HP company says they still will be "an active participant and investor in the project" as they wish to speed up the development of webOS so they are placing their bets on the Open Source community to help them achieve the goal. According to HP, patents related to webOS will remain under HP control in order to protect developers.
Image by Richard Adhikari, TechNewsWorld
I wish the webOS all good in it's new open sourced family and hopefully they will succeed at what HP didn't. They had a really good and inovative product, initially showcased on the Palm Pre smartphone family and later on running on HP TouchPad.
WebOS probably came out a tad too late, with apple's iOS and Google's Android already concouring the smartphones and as such had only minimal chance to succeed. And another crucial thing in this time of age that was/is missing, is the app eco system. No apps, no users, all this might change if the full potential of open source community gets activated.
Video bellow is showcasing the webOS in action with it's great multi-tasking solution, similar to what Nokia has done with Meego OS on their N9 smartphone device.