Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Nov 2007 21:36 UTC, submitted by irbis
Google and 33 other companies have announced an ambitious industry alliance that will maintain a completely open source mobile phone stack. The Open Handset Alliance says phones based on its Linux-based 'Android' stack will reach market in as soon as eight months. The Android stack is based on 'open Linux kernel', the group says. It also includes a full set of mobile phone application software, in order to "significantly lower the cost of developing and distributing mobile devices and services", OHA said.
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Member since:2005-07-13
Although the list of alliance members is impressive, it seems like a lot of these corporations are hedging their bets amongst the plethora of competing Linux-based smartphone projects. The FOSS community won't have any incentive to vote with its participation until somebody gets a viable and open device on the market.
Yes, I was waiting with bated breath for yet another announced linux-based open stack for smartphones, it's been at least six months since the last one. I suspect we'll probably see one or two more, before the industry starts to run out of ideas to standardize on and actually gets around to producing something.
Member since:
2005-07-08
So far the only technical detail I can find, other than that it's based on a Linux kernel, is that "it utilizes a custom virtual machine that has been designed to optimize memory and hardware resources in a mobile environment."
It's anyone's guess whether this VM is a bare-metal abstraction underneath Linux or a high-level runtime for application development.
Although the list of alliance members is impressive, it seems like a lot of these corporations are hedging their bets amongst the plethora of competing Linux-based smartphone projects. The FOSS community won't have any incentive to vote with its participation until somebody gets a viable and open device on the market.