Seems just the other day - actually it was two weeks ago - that we divined that HP, imagining blowing Google away, would pull out the stops to get the webOS that it bought, put in a tablet that failed in the market, dropped, then open sourced - life's funny like that - in shape to publish the code in stages.

And what do you know - surprise, surprise - HP Wednesday committed to a timetable for getting the thing out in steps by September under the lenient Apache 2.0 license.

See, here's the schedule:

HP is making much of the fact that it materialized the roadmap 47 days after it said it would open source webOS.

God knows whether HP or anybody else will ever really exploit the thing. For HP it depends on the auspices - like two bald eagles seen circling Google or Apple talons extended.

It does however reckon the move is "historic."

Unlike Android - which is based legally or illegally on Java - and Apple - which is based on BSD - webOS is, in HP's words, "100% web," thanks to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript and WebKit (the Qt - say cute - version, not the stuff HP modified). It's not beholden to Apple, Oracle, Google or Microsoft IP, and it's capable of running on any platform.

Anyway, HP's spending resources seeing where it will go. (Well, it has got a couple of billion in the thing already.) And by February or March it should have a business model that it hopes might capture the mobile business. At least it promises not to fragment like Android.

Ecosystem in mind, HP Wednesday released the source code to Enyo 2.0, an updated webOS developer tool so developers can write an application that works across mobile devices and desktop web browsers including iOS, Android, Internet Explorer and Firefox.

That takes care of the application framework.

Enyo 1.0 made it possible to write apps that worked on various webOS form factors. Version 2.0 extends this - shades of Java - "write once, run anywhere" capability to other platforms, including mobile and desktop web browsers.

HP's promising a governance model by February - we did anticipate that - along with UI widgets for Enyo and a JavaScript core. By March it should have a Linux kernel and in April an Ares 2.0 IDE and Enyo 2.1 followed in July by Enyo 2.2, a Luna system manager, a system manager bus and "core" applications.

The widgetry will beta in August and see a 1.0 release in September.

HP said in a press release that over the next six months it "will make individual elements of webOS source code available - from core applications like Mail and Calendar to its Linux kernel - until the full code base is contributed to the open source community by September."

Sam Greenblatt, a past CTO of CA and Candle Corporation, has been named CTO and head of technical strategy for the open webOS project, responsible for technical engineering. He's been at HP in one CTO capacity or another for years and involved in open source for longer than that. He thinks he's finally got this open source thing figured out.