Sam Greenblatt leaving HP for technology companies unknown 17

A little over six months ago, Sam Greenblatt was moved away from being the CTO of webOS at HP, bringing to an end a significant amount of headbutting and tension at the upper levels of the webOS Global Business Unit. What exactly transpired to end Greenblatt's short tenure at the top of the webOS GBU isn't clear, but since his departure, HP SVP Martin Risau has been leading the Open webOS effort and we expect will be in charge of Gram as an independent company when it launches as soon as this month.

For all of the drama that may have taken place during Greenblatt's tenure, there are a few key things that can be attributed to his leadership. Greenblatt, along with Manish Patil, was instrumental in the crafting of the roadmap that led to the release of the open sourced Open webOS 1.0 late last month. Greenblatt was also reportedly responsible for the decision to go with the Apache 2.0 open source licensing model and to switch from the custom kernels used by webOS since the start to the Linux Standard Kernel 3.3, opening up Open webOS to a wide variety of supported devices.

As for where Greenblatt is going to go from here, we don't have any specifics, but we can imagine that his experience at HP will be an asset wherever he lands. Rumor has it he's been interviewing with at least a few major competitors of HP in the United States. Additionally, we're told he has some strong feelings about Open webOS and wouldn't mind still working with the open source operating system wherever he lands. There are a lot of traditional computing companies out there struggling in the mobile space, so there's definitely an opening for Open webOS there.