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Hewlett-Packard has finally had enough with trying to figure out what to do with its failed acquisition of mobile platform webOS. So, it is doing the easiest thing possible to get out from under the burden of supporting the platform: turning it loose to the open source community.

In its press release announcing the open sourcing of webOS, HP said all the right things. It will continue to invest and be an active participant. It will provide inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation. It will be purely open source. Those almost seems to be conflicting statements. HP may think that it is trying to create a new Android ecosystem, but HP and Google's approaches to mobile are going in opposite directions.

It's no surprise that the new-and-re-improved Hewlett-Packard has come to the conclusion this afternoon, under newly-minted President and CEO Meg Whitman, that it will not spin off the Personal Systems Group (PSG) division responsible for producing PCs and tablets. This move was announced after the close of stock trading Thursday afternoon.

But one of the first questions analysts asked during an HP investors' press conference this afternoon was the fate of its tablet unit. Today, Whitman made it absolutely clear that any tablet PCs HP may produce in the coming year will center around Windows 8, not the webOS platform that HP acquired in the Palm buyout just over one year ago.

Hewlett-Packard released its quarterly earning statement today and tucked in the middle of the press release was a little bombshell: "HP reported that it plans to announce that it will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward."

As they say, another one bites the dust. Or does it?

HP is getting out of the mobile hardware business. This comes a week after Nokia said that it would discontinue Symbian phones in the U.S. In reality this does not change the U.S. (or global) mobile ecosystem at all. WebOS had almost no market share despite the fact that it is a well-made operating system from a once popular mobile vendor. Palm could not support it and HP cannot market it. News surfaced yesterday that Best Buy has 250,000 HP TouchPads (the tablet based on webOS) sitting in stock that it cannot get rid of. Yet, what exactly does it mean for HP to "continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward"?

Speaking at the D9 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. today, Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker said that it is a possibility that WebOS might end up on devices other than what HP manufactures.

"It is certainly something we would entertain," Apotheker said, according to AllThingsD. About 130 miles south in San Diego, WebOS head John Rubinstein said that licensing the operating system to select original equipment manufacturers is something that HP might consider. Licensing WebOS could be a great way for HP to broaden its horizons in the mobile market and cut into the market share of Apple, Android and Windows Phone 7 while bringing dynamic new Palm smartphones to the market. Will there ever be a HP WebOS Palm phone brought to you by Motorola or HTC?

The tendency to map our world with our own country or region front and center is well documented and reasonably well-understood, at least intellectually. When someone from America sees a map with, say, Peru in the middle, with south in the up position, it still creates some dissonance. But that dissonance can be useful, beyond simply disabusing ourselves of the notion of our own centrality. It can make the world, including our own homes, new again and impart us with an urge to understand how elsewhere affects here.

Cyrus Farivar has done much the same thing with his book, "The Internet of Elsewhere: The Emergent Effects of a Wired World."

The days of enterprises choosing one smartphone vendor appear to be ending. Forrester reported last year that 60% of enterprises support employee-owned smartphones, and mixed environments are becoming the norm.

BlackBerry was still the most popular enterprise smartphone operating system as of Forrester's Q1 2010 survey. According to Good Technology's numbers, iOS is growing the fastest by far. But with more enterprise tools for Android on the market - including new tools recently released by Zenprise and the forthcoming offerings from Motorola and SAP - Android is poised for strong growth.

HP is planning to reveal an iPad rival next month which will run the mobile operating system called webOS, the primary asset HP gained when it merged with Palm last summer. At least, that's our take in listening to the statements made by HP exec Todd Bradley, an executive VP in the company's Personal Systems Group, who spoke about webOS's future in a recent CNBC interview.

But according to Bradley, tablets aren't all HP has in store for webOS.  He spoke of the operating system coming to more devices, "everything from smartphones to tablets to PCs to potentially other large screen devices."  PCs? TVs? What does HP have planned?

At HP-Palm's "Developer Day" in New York this weekend, the company revealed details regarding its new application framework called Enyo, named after the Greek goddess of war. Reportedly, the framework loads apps faster, is more flexible and easier to use, and will help support a number of different device form factors, including the tablet computer.

Dion Almaer is one of the best-known cutting edge developers focused on emerging Open Web technologies, like HTML5. When Almaer joined Palm just over a year ago, it was big news. Today Almaer announced that he and his long-time cohort Ben Galbraith are leaving the company to found their own startup.

Almaer spent time as the Open Web Advocate at Google and the Director of Developer Tools at Mozilla before taking a position as Director of Developer Relations at Palm. He and Galbraith co-founded the popular developer blog Ajaxian. Almaer used his announcement as an opportunity to make some strong statements about the importance of the Open Web.

Yesterday Good released its first ever quarterly report on enterprise mobile device activations. In August, we reported that the iPhone 4, released on June 24, was Good's top most activated device in by the end of July. Good's first quarterly report confirms what we reported in August - iOS remains the most activated device among Good customers. Good doesn't support BlackBerry, which according to Forrester is still the most popular enterprise smart phone OS. Here's Good's top ten: