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."
The CE Linux Forum site was built with Frontpage 5.0 and hosted on IIS. Pay no mind to the man behind the curtain, Dorothy.
Unfortunately, the demands of content providers (including Sony) for Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) might make openness and iteroperability disappear. If there is a common platform for DRM, the devices are more likely to play well together than if everyone chooses a different OS and DRM.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
This is the true spirit of linux.
Given the magnitude of the invoilved companies, I think this is a great step toward linux. Of the companies listed I own atleast one product from each and think a standardized front end to a broad range of devices is a wonderful idea.
Given the fact that almost every CE device has a frontend nowadays, it would be great if these guys pooled thier resources and created a standardized UI/Widget set that was highly portable and robust enough to handle the demands that these devices would require.
My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
You said
but then you also said
If your device is capable of running Linux, it's capable of controlling a USB port. Why, then, wouldn't USB be a useful connection type?
If you give away your software you can't really think of it as your property anymore, i.e. Linux doesn't belong to hackers. Regardless, "general hackers" aren't electronics manufacturers. So why should general hackers dictate what the standards and requirements for Linux on this kind of device is? This organization isn't meant to get input from the hackers, it's meant to make specifications that the coders can choose to implement or not implement.
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
Maybe he just RTFA.
They are going to "Extend Linux." That means Open. WTF would they doing to do otherwise? Distribute pre-compiled modules for every architecture? Give me a break. Companies don't develop proprietary stuff in groups of eight. The whole point is openess.. they want interoperability with each others' products.
From the frontpage:
The CELF is a place to come and discuss various issues that are of particular importance to the CE industry. Through an open process, the CELF members will clarify and codify certain requirements to be addressed by the open source community. Thereafter, the CELF will evaluate any open source submissions as to their effectiveness and responsiveness to the requirements. Open source submissions accepted by the CELF Architecture Group and Steering Committee will be incorporated into the CELF source tree, which itself is open to the public.
Through this open process, the CELF intends to leverage the benefits of the open source community and process to maximize the re-use of common solutions to common problems and thereby create a foundation on which the CELF members and others can build compelling networked products. We welcome you to join the CELF and work with us to realize an open platform for compelling new consumer electronics products.
The unofficial