Mobile Industry Leaders Planning Globally Adopted Mobile Linux Platform

location based services


Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone have announced their intent to establish a global open Linux-based software platform for mobile devices.A world-class Linux-based platform would provide key benefits for the mobile industry including lower development costs, increased flexibility, and a richer mobile ecosystem according to the group.These companies are also announcing their intent to form an independent foundation. The founder companies' objective is to realize the development of the platform based on the contributions of all interested stakeholders through an open and transparent process. Focusing primarily on the joint development and marketing of an API specification, architecture, supporting source code-based reference implementation components and tools, the foundation intends to leverage the benefits of community-based and proprietary development.Foundation members intend to work establishing safeguards to minimize fragmentation and increased collaboration on a mobile Linux developer ecosystem. Once established, the foundation aims to provide an API specification, architecture, references to open source code, new source code-based reference implementation components (to be developed and committed by foundation members) and specifications for referenced third party software. The foundation also plans to provide a test suite to assess and demonstrate product conformance to the platform specification.While the initial foundation members plan to be primarily responsible for delivering the development of the first reference implementation of the mobile operating platform, they will also actively encourage membership participation of other companies committed to its development. More information about how others can join the foundation will be made available at a later date.