Open Source, Gadgets | featured news

Hewlett Packard donates its mobile system software, WebOS, to the open source community and says it will continue to invest in the project. The tech company acquired the software when it bought the smartphone maker Palm for $1.2bn (£767m) last year. HP used the code to power its short-lived range Touchpad tablet computers before it abandoned the product line.

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth thinks Ubuntu Linux has a shot to be a contending operating system for future phones and tablets. It'll be a tough go -- Apple iOS and Google Android dominate the field now, with new Windows Phone 7 also making a play.

Nokia’s new all-screen N9 phone, the product of its ill-fated collaboration with Intel on the open sourced Meego operating system, is here.

The ultimate hacker phone, the Nokia N900 is the truest expression of Linux—the OS and the philosophy—that you'll find on mobile this year. It's a great niche gadget. But the idea that free, open-source solutions will sweep the mobile world is just as doomed in the U.S. as the idea of popular, open-source desktop PCs—in this case, because mobile networks don't welcome the unexpected, and they don't welcome geeks.