Hewlett Packard has announced that they intend to donate webOS to the open source community.

Under the regime of former CEO Leo Apotheker, the webOS project, which HP acquired with Palm, virtually collapsed when the company announced they intended to discontinue their TouchPad tablet.

HP was adamant that webOS would live on as the operating system of choice for printers and other peripheral tablets, though this widespread adoption has yet to materialize.

After two ‘fire-sales’ to clear out remaining TouchPad inventory (with another expected this weekend), webOS now has a robust user base. According to a statement by CEO Meg Whitman HP hopes to unleash “the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices.”