Submitted by Another mobile Linux consortium? Yup, another mobile Linux consortium. “ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments, today announced the formation of Linaro, a not-for-profit open source software engineering company dedicated to enhancing open source innovation for the next wave of always-connected, always-on computing. Linaro’s work will help developers and manufacturers provide consumers with more choice, more responsive devices and more diverse applications on Linux-based systems.”
The summary sounds as if they want to create a whole new linux distro. In reality, their providing additional programming & funding muscle for existing linux based mobile targeted Linux distros
That’s freaking awesome! By the title I was thinking ‘Oh crap, another one? More ammo for the “too many distros” camp’. But this is very good news.
But actually the first thought I had was…. Wow, did Apple piss a lot of big name companies off, or what?
Really, the Linux World (is there such a thing?) should have done this a long time ago, gone after the embedded and small device market. I know there have been attempts before, but I’ve always figured that this would be the only way that Linux as a name could really get out to the mass of people, since Microsoft is installed by default on the majority of all computers. With Linux being installed on so many phones by default, it will have a lot more mind share in the public eyes.
Well done by all involved.
As an embedded system engineer, I can tell one thing.
In fact, Linux is almost everywhere.
You just simply don’t see it.
Look, your Computer screen, your TV, your microwave oven, sat decoders, coffie machine, etc, etc. Almost everything which present you a menu on a LCD in fact.
OK it is not 100% of devices running Linux, but it is pretty good in term of market shares.
But I guess, for the small mobile computing, I share your point of view, Linux should have more “market shares”.
😉
Right. We should celebrate, not complain about the influx of millions of dollars on development of the OS we love (for some definitions of “we”), and components thereof.
The money will benefit the whole ecosystem, including desktop users. Increased mindshare is even a bigger plus.
From the article
Limited choice of platforms? Linux runs on everything for christs sake!
“ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments, today announced the formation of Linaro…”
This was actually plan B for them. Initially they attempted to form Voltron, but after a few catastrophic failures (one literally leaving Voltron with 2 left feet), the consortium decided it would just be easier to support Linux…
Edited 2010-06-04 18:42 UTC
“Linaro will invest resources in open source projects that can then be used by Linux-based distributions such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS.”
Anyone know will they invest in stuff related to Maemo Linux?
Edited 2010-06-07 00:05 UTC
Well MeeGo is the new Maemo somehow. And you got it wrong. They create software that can help any ARM distro. Those were just giving some examples.
Where they will invest is on software, tools and kernel optimizations for ARM, every distribution that compiles Linux for ARM will be able to use them.
I would say that Maemo is included, but by the time Linaro will have something, development on Maemo should be dead and replaced by MeeGo.