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OSDL's Mobile Linux Initiative
Rob writes "The Open Source Development Labs has introduced a new initiative to accelerate the
adoption of Linux in the mobile market by providing a forum for device manufacturers,
network operators, and application developers. Like the OSDL's other working groups, the
MLI will provide a forum for creating requirement specifications based on existing
implementations and invest in existing and new
mobile Linux projects to identify and fill gaps in the open source operating system's
functionality."
Yes but saying that , you could just use something like fluxbox or even TWM(to go to an extreme) , Which both perform brilliantly on today's hardware .. They even perform wonderfully on 10+ year old hardware . ., So you can imagine how well they perform on up to date hardware .
Even things like Xfce perform wonderfully on old hardware
Performance is not something to worry about in desktop environments, we don't need better performing WM/DEs (even KDE can run fairly well on a p2 ) .
What we perhaps need is an improved UI in some things (personal preference ).No gain in this sector will likely appear from this initiative , considering the way most Mobile devices handle input .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
As a (former) mobile software developer, I think this is fantastic. Symbian and Windows Mobile are currently the two mainstay "open" platforms for developers. Java is making inroads, but no two phone's Java VMs are the same, making it a nightmare for developers (write once, debug everywhere). Symbian suffers a bit from this malady as well - each phone model resulted in a some tweaks to the software, and more often than not, a special executable. It should come as no big surprise that the best platform today for mobile developers is from Microsoft. The tools are quite good (and free), and the various instances of the platform (Smartphone, Pocket PCs) are sufficiently similar from an application's persective that only 1 source tree is needed. Further, the same executable will run on every device as long as it is a compatible CPU like the ARM - which is what almost all of them are. Linux in the mobile space would be a great thing - especially if a decent set of tools (and libraries and FOSS applications) were available to accelerate the process.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
The only reason you percieve it being better on the desktop is because Ruby and Python use bindings to an already native GUI library, while Java has it's own which is not native, so of course it will seem slower.
This is not an obstcale on mobile platforms since MIDP defines standard GUI objects which are implimented in native code.
Java actually runs faster than Ruby or Python in the back-end because it is compiled code, whereas Ruby and Python are interpreted (notwithstanding JIT compilers). On a mobile platform though, there would be no benefit to any of them, except that Java already has a huge developer and application base in the mobile arena, so it would win out.