In a move which indicates that Hewlett-Packard (HP) has delivered on its January promise of contributing its webOS mobile platform to the open-source community, the company shipped the beta release of the Open webOS on Friday.

Despite the fact that the beta release of the Open webOS is chiefly aimed at the developers, the on-schedule shipping of the beta version is, nonetheless, an indication that HP will likely ship the Open webOS 1.0 this month as planned.

According to a blog post by the HP webOS team, the beta release of the Open webOS comprises a total of 54 webOS components, or 450,000 lines of code under the Apache 2.0 license. The beta also offers two separate build environments - a desktop build and the OpenEmbedded build - to facilitate the developers, partners, HP engineers, and other hardware manufacturers to tweak the mobile OS to suit their needs.

Going by the details shared by HP, the desktop build essentially offers a development environment which is ideals for "enhancing the webOS user experience with new features and integrating state of the art open source technologies"; while the OpenEmbedded build provides an improved environment for porting webOS to current as well as new devices.

About the release of the Open webOS beta on schedule, HP said in a blog post: "It has taken a lot of hard work, long hours and weekend sacrifices by our engineering team to deliver on our promise and we have accomplished this goal."