Slashdot Mirror
Electronic Giants Form CE Linux Forum
Adam Wern writes "Matsushita Electric Industrial, Sony Corporation, Hitachi, NEC Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sharp Corporation, and Toshiba Corporation, today announced the establishment of the CE Linux Forum. CELF will discuss and formalize requirements for extensions to Linux to meet the needs of CE products such as audio/visual products and cellular phones, etc. CELF will publish such requirements and will accept and evaluate open source solutions that support to meet the published requirements. CELF will also promote broad usage of Linux for CE products. IBM, an industry leader in Linux solutions and supporter of open standards ecosystems, is pursuing membership and plans to be an active participant in the CELF."
CE = consumer electronics. Article says that they're talking about Linux CE and not Windows CE.
I think your brain is getting tripped up on "Windows CE" and is thinking CE == PDA, which is not at all the case. PDAs are a very small subset of all consumer electronics.
I2C is an alternative to RS-232. Actually, it's an alternative to RS-422. SMBus has some usefulness as well but I2C, I think, is closer to "where it's at".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I hope Motorola joins in, as well. Then there's the Embedded Linux Consortium. I do hope they consolidate their resources.
On a different note, any news on the Motorola A760?
One might wonder if these companies contributing code to a version of the Linux kernel would mean other intellectual property debacles a la SCO. But, according to an article written by Slashdot's Roblimo on Newsforge, there is legal stuff you must sign before your code is allowed into the tree:
:-)
"...as long as you include a paragraph's worth of non-onerous disclaimer (basically an agreement to release your code under the GPL or LGPL) with each submission, along with disclosure of any patents, patents pending or other claims you know about that might encumber the submitted code."
So I think they've got that base covered. Good Thing(tm).
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
Speaking on behalf of the Forum, (I'm co-Chair of the Architecture Group) I can say that forking is not our intention. It is the strong desire of the member companies to keep synchronized (to about the same degree current popular Linux distros keep synchronized) with the kernel.org tree.
This article has additional information, including that the forum plans to release some source by the end of summer.