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Consortium Tackles Linux Mobile Phone Standards
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices.com is running an article stating that ten companies have recently banded together to launch a cross-industry consortium to further advance embedded Linux platforms. They hope to make 'Linux into a plug-and-play mobile phone platform comparable to Microsoft's Windows Mobile Smartphone OS, but with greater flexibility and lower costs. The LiPS (Linux Phone Standard) Forum intends to help make Linux a more standardized, interoperable mobile phone OS.' Meanwhile, some market research suggests that Linux is already giving Windows Mobile a run for its money."
C'mon. If you're an embedded developer, what're you going to (want to) go for? A closed-source, royalty-based model, or an open-source, royalty-free model -- especially wherein you're able to modify the kernel to your whim? MS's marketing will be sure to push the first option, but common sense really makes the second pretty damn attractive.
"why oh why can't I just get a phone that works as a phone?!"
There, hopefully that'll stop this discussion from having 80% comments like this...
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
i didn't realize how huge linux was in the smartphone market. i figured it was all between windows mobile and symbian.
i can see standardizing mobile linux as being a very good thing for linux in that market.
maybe linux's lead isn't so large - the last link in the article, when you read through it, points out that the data does not inlclude phones/pdas running on microsoft's pocket PC edition of windows.
Symbian should be the real target here. Mobile Windows is very resource hungry. An embedded Linux for mobile devices that is stingy with resources to conserve battery life would be a welcome addition.
... in the US, at least. Look at how Verizon Wireless cripples phones' feature sets. Was the ROKR's 100 song limitation resulting from Apple's desire to not have it compete with its Ipods, or was it the desire of the wireless carriers to not impact their ringtone business, or a little of both? I would not be surprised to see embedded linux being used to drive down device costs, but as a platform to provide new wireless features, it seems that time and time again, the U.S wireless carriers expect to extract fees.
The standardization on GSM in Europe and other places would seem to invite the possibility of a market where you bring your own phone (versus having it generally tied to a provider via a protocol), and this could foster new apps running on linux phones, but GPRS does not provide a lot of bandwidth to do interesting things.
I guess syncing PIM and email stuff is all well and good, but for new and inventive applications, I would not be too optimistic
ostiguy
Can I get it for my laptop? Seriously...
KDE/Gnome, Firefox, Thunderbird. Open Office. All huge.
Deleted
http://www.maemo.org/?
After reviewing the GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
What the hell are you talking about? Exactly what part of the GPL license makes your lawyers think that compiling code with gcc will force you to release the code under the GPL?
Either you need to change your lawyers or you're trolling. That stament is really, really stupid.