Android's open source nature has made it a firm favourite with plenty, but those that trumpet the platform may have a new OS to rally around.

Via a posting on its developer blog, HP has for the first time detailed the governance model it plans to adopt with webOS since it announced it was going open source, with all signs suggesting the platform will be far more open on a practical level than Android.

Public player

Unlike Google's OS, where development of the platform is kept behind closed doors - Google releasing source code in big batches after major releases - HP is looking to involve the development community in almost every stage of its development.

That's because webOS's main components – Enyo and Iris – have been split up into subprojects, each one developed in public code repositories that anyone can access.

As such, contributors will be able to implement improvements under their own steam, branching from the latest code and – in theory – keeping webOS ticking even if it never officially launches on another mobile or tablet.

A question of responsibility

"Each project has a Project Management Committee (PMC), comprised of committers elected within the project’s community to provide oversight for the project," said Fred Patton, editor-in-chief of HP's webOS developer portal.

"All committers report to the PMC of the component they represent. The PMC uses a consensus-based decision making process to determine whether or not to take a contribution from the community and commit it to the code tree."

Of course, HP's especially open approach arguably stems from its decision to drop support for the platform itself: with no webOS smartphones or tablets due from the giant - which purchased Palm for $1.2 billion back in April 2010 - it has waved much responsibility for the platform's development moving forward.

More details on webOS's governance model can be found on HP's developer blog.

[source: Ars Technica]