After weeks of deliberation, Hewlett-Packard (HP) will now contribute its webOS mobile operating system to the open source community.

Meg Whitman, HP’s newly-minted president and chief executive officer, said in a media statement Friday: ”webOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable. By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices”.

All webOS source codes will be available under an open source license to be determined later. HP will engage the open source community to define the charter of the new open source project under a set of operating principles that include accelerating the open development of the platform and transparent governance to avoid fragmentation. …

If you need to use a Windows program occasionally on a Mac but don’t want to cough up US$80 for Parallels Desktop 7, a new Mac app by NES Software might be worth considering.

Dubbed WinOnX, the US$4.99 app is based on the Wine open source project that lets users of Linux and Unix-based operating systems run Windows applications through a software compatibility layer. As a former Linux user, I depended on Wine to run Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and some utility applications. …

Amidst the brouhaha surrounding the spat between Oracle and Salesforce at Oracle Openworld this year, Oracle unveiled a public cloud service to strengthen its position in the SaaS market. The world’s second largest software maker also announced significant products that would help companies make better business decisions by making sense of the growing avalanche of corporate data. Here’s a rundown of the key announcements and what they mean for enterprises: …

If you thought having to choose between iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7 was enough of a headache, we’ve got news for you. Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox Web browser, has launched a new project called “Boot to Gecko”, or B2G, to “pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web”.

The end product will be an operating system that boots directly into the Web, like what Google’s Chrome OS is doing, only for your phone. A core component of the OS will be drawn from Android, to allow hardware to work easily. Mozilla plans on publishing the source code as it’s developed. …

In an Android Developers blog post yesterday, Android SDK tech lead Xavier Ducrohet announced that the full SDK for Android 3.0 is now available to developers.

The APIs are final, and developers can start creating apps for this new platform and publish them to Android Market.

Android 3.0, targeted at new tablet devices such as the Motorola Xoom, includes several new features for users and developers. These include a a new “holographic” user interface (UI) designed from the ground up to take advantage of larger displays.

According to Google, “the new UI brings fresh paradigms for interaction, navigation, and customization and makes them available to all applications – even those built for earlier versions of the platform. Applications written for Android 3.0 are able to use an extended set of UI objects, powerful graphics, and media capabilities to engage users in new ways”. …

The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle had left developers on tenterhooks over the future of the Java programming language.

Those concerns were laid to rest on Monday by a top Oracle executive who shared the Java roadmap with JavaOne attendees on the sidelines of Oracle Openworld.

Thomas Kurian, Oracle executive vice-president for product development, said: “I’ve been at JavaOne since 1997, but this year is very special for us because it is the first year that Oracle is the steward and responsible for Java. What we want to do today is to make sure every developer is crystal clear on where we see the Java platform evolving.”

Oracle will unveil JDK 7 in 2011, with JDK 8 coming a year later, Kurian revealed. He also assured developers that Oracle is committed to delivering the best Java Virtual Machine as well as OpenJDK, the open source implementation of the Java programming language.

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Constrained by Red Hat’s tardiness in keeping Red Hat Enterprise Linux up to speed, Oracle has decided to spin off a new version of the Linux kernel dubbed the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.

To date, Oracle Linux, which has claimed 5,000 customers, is built on the Red Hat Compatible Kernel that allows customers to continue running Red Hat applications.

In his keynote address Sunday, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison highlighted key issues the company faced with retaining full compatibility with Red Hat.

“Oracle spends a lot of time finding bugs in Red Hat Linux and fixing them. However, when we find the bugs, Red Hat has been very slow in incorporating those bugs into their software,” he said.

Ellison also noted that Red Hat has also been slow to take up enhancements contributed by the community.

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In a move that stunned many in the tech circles, Oracle pulled a trigger on Google with a lawsuit alleging that the Android platform and devices infringe one or more Java patents and copyright.

Oracle claims that Google has been aware of Sun’s patent portfolio, including the patents at issue, since the middle of this decade, when Google hired certain former Sun Java engineers.

The lawsuit leads one to question the intentions of Oracle’s latest lawsuit and its commitment to open source. Java has been covered by the open source General Public License since 2006, way before Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems was completed in January 2010. …

New developments in Linux are about to emerge from Asia with the Linux Foundation’s heightened focus in the region. Last week, the foundation appointed Cliff Miller as its new director of China operations and Alex Lu, who will hold the same job in Taiwan.

Miller co-founded TurboLinux in 1992, bringing commercial Linux to Japan and China in the 1990s. He also co-founded Mountain View Data in 2000, which provided Linux-based data storage software and server provisioning software to the enterprise.

Miller’s counterpart, Lu is a co-founder at DeviceVM and, as the senior vice president of business development, continues to close worldwide contracts with leading OEMs to bring Linux to netbooks, notebooks and desktop PCs.

The choice of China and Taiwan to unleash a fresh wave of innovation in the Linux platform on servers and mobile devices is hardly surprising. …

Valtteri Halla, the Nokia member of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group recently attempted to allay the concerns of the open source community by underscoring the importance of openness in the development of the MeeGo operating system.

In a blog post last week, the veteran Nokia executive who has been working to get Linux onto Nokia phones since 2000, announced that the MeeGo repository will be opened by the end of this month. The source and binary repo will provide a raw baseline for building MeeGo on the Nokia N900 and Intel Atom-based netbooks.

What’s more interesting is the flurry of debate surrounding the details – or lack thereof – related to the processes that will enable the open source development model to flourish around the MeeGo platform. So far, Halla has said little about the decisions made by the technical steering group to choose RPM rather than deb as the package manager for MeeGo:

While code is certainly the most important question, the most frequently asked, however, has been about technology selections. The big ticket items like Qt, OBS and RPM were already communicated at the launch and as we expected, kicked off a few small avalanches of debate! These selections were, of course, pre-agreed and I can assure you that the amount of effort spent in resolving these was not small. After all, these are the points driving most of the investment cost and transition pains for Nokia, Intel and the Moblin and Maemo communities. Further selections are mostly still under discussion and beyond a few obvious ones (X, connman, ofono, gstreamer, dbus,…) can be considered as working assumptions for MeeGo 1 release. Now that the internal responsibilities within Intel and Nokia are becoming clear I expect that the people behind these selections and assumptions will start appearing in meego.com pages, mailing lists and wikis during the coming days.

This has generated some concerns that developers are being left out of the conversation, thus increasing their skepticism of the purported “openness” of the MeeGo platform. To be fair, it was necessary for the steering group to make some hard decisions at the beginning of a big open source initiative that merges two existing platforms. Otherwise, we could argue till the cows come home and nothing will move.

But what is the process that governs these decisions? Are we talking about a process similar to JCP (Java Community Process), where there are clearly defined procedures for the development and revision of the Java’s technology specifications?

Other tough questions that need to be addressed: driver support from hardware and device manufacturers, DRM support that is compatible with operators’ content business and application support for potentially different variants of MeeGo that could emerge. The technical steering group should address these issues early on if it wants to seed a rich developer ecosystem that is crucial for the success of any mobile platform.