Motorola's New Open Source Resource

illogict writes "Among with their new A1200 GNU/Linux-based mobile phone, Motorola unveiled yesterday its new community-based development platform, http://open source.motorola.com. It is primarily aimed at developers who are willing to contribute to Motorola's GNU/Linux-based mobile phones, either directly on firmware, or creating programs (native or Java) who are aimed to work on those phones. It currently features phone kernels, SD-TransFlash card reader drivers, Java MIDP3.0 draft. Such commitment on open source-development could be seen as a good step, and may show the way to other companies."

Comments

Why is this open source??

[i am kman]

Hmmm, open source for a proprietary, niche HW platform. Sounds like they're too cheap to hire their own developers and are using the Open Source buzzward in hopes for some free SW development.

So, there was some debate about whether you can package proprietary drivers with open source. So, can you package open source drivers with proprietary hardware?

Open source generally implies users installing the OS on their own devices. I don't really see this happening on a large scale with Motorola since it'll come pre-bundled. So on has to wonder, what's the point of open sourcing stuff?

Its more how the carriers handle things

[EmbeddedJanitor]

In the US, quite a few phone features are turned off because the carriers don't want them available. For example, some phones that are internally wifi capable have the wifi disabled to prevent them meing used as VoIP handsets, thus forcing people to use regular (billable) phone services instead.

So if new apps start to threated revenue streams for the carriers you can expect them to be disbaled. Or, alternatively, you can expect the carriers to provide their own similar services. If you think about how MS destroyed 3rd party middleware developers you'll probably be on the right track.