Hewlett Packard has donated webOS to the open source community as a part of its plans to reinvent itself.

The operating system's fate was darkened when the company announced that it would no longer develop smartphones and tablets based on webOS. HP had abandoned its webOS plans just weeks after it launched the HP TouchPad tablet device.

According to HP CEO Meg Whitman, who recently took over from Leo Apotheker, the company won't shut down the operating system, which it acquired when it bought Palm for $1.2 billion, and instead will make it open source to keep it alive.

The company said that the 600-strong webOS staff will be a part of a new start-up, reports The Guardian, which will be focused on providing for the 750,000 TouchPad tablets that were sold as a part of a firesale.

"WebOS is the only platform designed from the ground up to be mobile, cloud-connected and scalable," said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer, in a statement.

"By contributing this innovation, HP unleashes the creativity of the open source community to advance a new generation of applications and devices." she added.

Whitman also revealed that HP plans to launch two Windows 8 tablet devices in 2012 and is most likely to experiment with webOS once more in 2013.