Ever since HP announced they would be open sourcing webOS, we've been wondering "to what end?" Going open source can only amount to so much with only the community pushing forward the development. Earlier this month we told you about Open webOS Professional Edition, a version of webOS offered by Gram to OEMs that reintegrates all of the services that made webOS, you know, webOS. But who's going to use it?
Turns out the first company to use Open webOS in a commercial setting isn't one you might expect, and they aren't planning to do it in a form factor that's rather new for webOS. It's LG, and they're making a webOS television.
The project of porting Open webOS to the big screen has been underway for several months, well before the revelation that HP would be spinning the webOS GBU off as an independent Gram. Headed by HP's Leonid Zolotarev, with Keith Weng leading program management and former Motorola project manager Thom Davis in charge of engineering, the Open webOS porting project has aimed to bring the user interface of webOS to the television, replacing LG's aging NetCast smart TV platform. NetCast was introduced back at CES 2009 (the same CES where the original Palm Pre was introduced and won Best of Show). While webOS has been overhauled multiple times since then, NetCast hasn't evolved much, though it's had a few new apps added over the years.
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