When one door closes….On the heels of the news that Hewlett-Packard (HP) would be axing 27,000 jobs (8 percent of its global workforce) have come new reports that Google has hired most of the key members of the team that was working to turn HP’s mobile operating system, WebOS, into an open source platform for third-party development.
Reports from The Verge and All Things D on late Thursday state that Google has hired about a half-dozen HP employees working on the Web OS Enyo project, including senior director Matt McNulty, presumably to work on Google’s own Android mobile software.
McNulty neither confirmed nor denied the reports, tweeting cryptically Thursday: “hmm… slow news night.”
HP in December 2011 announced its decision to turn its formerly tightly-guarded WebOS into an open source platform, giving third-party developers access to the source code to allow them to modify it and build their own versions. The decision came after a prolonged and agonizing decisionmaking process at HP corporate that saw the ouster of CEO Leo Apotheker, who had ordered HP to halt development on the software, which HP had purchased along with Palm for $1.2 billion back in 2010.
HP told The Verge and AllThingsD that its current plans to release open source versions of Palm OS later this year are on schedule.
