The South Korean company, LG Electronics Inc. has purchased a mobile operating system from Hewlett-Packard that used to be a Palm product before HP purchased it. The Hewlett-Packard WebOS was originally meant for the company’s smart devices, but it failed and thus turned into an open source project. Now, HP has recently moved into Android for its tablets with Slate 7 and has sold its open source project to LG. LG will be using the HP WebOS for supporting its next-generation Smart TV technology.
The acquisition of source code, engineering talent, associated documents and related websites took place under an authentic agreement between the two companies. As part of the dealing, LG will get licenses under HP’s Intellectual Property (IP) for supporting its WebOs products. It will include patents from Palm including user interface technologies and fundamental operating system for broad use in the industry.
LG will assume protection of the open source projects of Enyo and WebOS. However, HP will retain ownership of all Palm cloud computing assets (infrastructure, source code, talent and contracts). In other words, HP will be supporting Palm users. Both the companies do not expect a material impact of this transaction on their financial statements, but there is no disclosure of terms for the deal.
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