Google could have a potential enemy now that Hewlett Packard revealed that they are planning to pursue their WebOS project which is incidentally, also an open source project.

HP recently announced that they have already decided to open its WebOS mobile operating system to developers and companies. The company also announced that this project will be directly reporting to Meg Whitman, the company's CEO. This WebOS project is now officially Whitman's signature HP project. The company's decision is aided by the company's goal to aid the process of application development through enabling these companies and developers to use or alter the platform freely. HP also said that the company will make WebOS available under an open source licensing agreement but details for the licensing deal has not yet been revealed.

HP originally acquired WebOS through a US$1.2 billion purchase last 2010 of Palm, a struggling smartphone manufacturing company. The company acquired this as part of the company's plan to partake in the growing tablet and smartphone industry. HP was able to utilize the OS in different smartphones and eventually through its first tablet, the TouchPad which was released last July. Unfortunately, the response for this device was less than stellar and it failed to penetrate the tablet market. This prompted HP to announce that they were going to stop manufacturing future plans for smartphones and tablets as the company is undergoing leadership transition. HP CEO Meg Whitman even revealed that the company was considering other options for WebOS such as selling it to other companies or completely shutting this division down. The company eventually decided to "open source" it.

Whitman revealed that they decided to take this strategy for WebOS because they were inspired by the success of Android stating that "We like the adoption of Android. It's growing like wildfire with a big developer community and hardware community." However, HP also recognizes the problem of Android especially the fragmentation of the said software and HP would like to eliminate this kind of problem from happening to WebOS. Whitman also hinted that the company could possibly foray back in the consumer tablet market by the year 2013 and eliminated the possibility of producing any type of HP smartphone.