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."
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.
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".