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Mobile Linux Group Releases First Specification
narramissic writes "Google's Android may be getting all the headlines, but the venerable LiPS (Linux Phone Standards Forum), which launched to much fanfare in 2005, is rolling out the specs. The group, comprised of companies including Orange, France Telecom, MontaVista, and Access, announced Monday that it has completed the first release of its mobile Linux specification, adding components including APIs for telephony, messaging, calendar, instant messaging, and presence functions, as well as new user interface components."
Orange is a brand of France Telecom, not two separate entities:
http://www.orange.com/english/access/aboutUs.php
I haven't looked at the actual standards, but perhaps it would be possible to extend the OHA code to add LiPS support, to produce a phone that can run apps developed for either.
Reviewing the member list at the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS) web site I noticed that none of the major handset companies joined this organization. The Open Handset Alliance on the other hand has HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung as members.
Having a standard is all well and good, but it only matters if someone puts it into a phone.
Also, how many development platforms can survive in the cell phone market anyway? Besides Android and LiPS (we'll ignore Microsoft for now), there are Symbian, the LiMo Foundation and a la Mobile - all Linux-based. The first two or three to get accepted will attract the developers and dominate the market (unless they *really* bring something new to the game).
Never let reality temper imagination
Never let reality temper imagination
Google's Android may be getting all the headlines, but the venerable LiPS (Linux Phone Standards Forum), which launched to much fanfare in 2005, is rolling out the specs.
From what I understand, the LiPS had been "stuck in committee" with no real progress until Google announced Android. Then all of the sudden, there was a flurry of activity.
Specs are nice, and it's good to see progress, but the slashdot summary seems to have a distinct "look at LiPS, it's better, it has SPECS!". That's great, but..here's a prototype device running Android, and let's not forget the OpenMoko people, which have not only got a so-close-you-can-taste it physical device, they've got a pretty sorted software package as well, which runs on a couple of existing phone/pda widgets. The OpenMoko stuff and the Palm/HP/etc PDA stuff (I forget the proper project names, sorry!) is quite open and documented. The Linux-on-handheld boys have had working software out there for *years*.
Welcome to the party, boys. Beer's been had, chips are gone- there's some frosting left on the cake platter, though. Same thing to Google- it's nice that they have shiny prototypes, but if they're so open-source, why couldn't they work with any of the existing groups? Ah, I love the open source world: why help someone else, when you can re-invent your own wheel (anyone remember the days of Freshmeat's front page being literally FILLED with mp3 players software?)
Please help metamoderate.
OpenMoko is a Chinese manufacturer's plan to outsource software usinghe FOSS community. [1]
LiPS is a partnership between PalmSource/ACCESS and MontaVista Linux to collaborate on Linux phone development. Open Source Development Labs (OSDL, Slashdot's mom) began its own Mobile Linux Initiative in 2005, involving MontaVista, Wind River, and PalmSource. LiPS seemed to be an outgrowth of that. Trolltech introduced its own Greenphone platform based on Qt last fall. Earlier this year, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone formed their own group called LiMo to develop Linux standards for mobiles. The majority of Linux phones are built by Motorola, which uses MontaVista's Linux. They are sold to the Chinese market and are not open in any sense. [2]
Google's Android is an Apache-like collaboration that shares Google's plans and implementation rather than forming a group to develop some. [3]
Apple's iPhone is based around its Mach+BSD+Cocoa architecture, but is just as closed as most Linux phones. It appears Apple will open development in the sense of releasing an SDK that allows commercial development, but it's not yet known how much access developers will have. [4][5]
One significant difference between Linux on a PC and Linux on a mobile is that it is illegal to expose the core baseband processor architecture to open software, because that would make it trivial to create network destroying devices. So "Linux-based mobiles" are really just mobile phones that have some extra environment to run the user interface and higher level functions. They are not freedom/open/GPL untainted by Big Brother/Capitalism/Corporations.
That makes it valid to be interested in mobile Linux because of familiarity with the architecture, the availability of low cost software, and a desire to expand the market for Linux based products, but there is little real political GPL-freedom argument for pursuing mobile Linux.
Google appears to initially be targeting Windows Mobile [6], and offers an alternative to the increasingly creaky Symbian [7]. Some amount of Google's Android seems complementary with efforts to use Linux on the lower levels, but it also competes against the higher level plans of LiPS, Greenphone, LiMo, and OpenMoko, none of which appear to have a very significant future.
[1] Apple iPhone vs the FIC Neo1973 OpenMoko Linux Smartphone
[2] The Standard Soup Prepared by Linux Mobile's Many Chefs
[3] The Great Google gPhone Myth
[4] Steve Jobs Ends iPhone SDK Panic
[5] Leopard, Vista and the iPhone OS X Architecture
[6] The Spectacular Failure of WinCE and Windows Mobile
[7] Origins: Why the iPhone is ARM, and isn't Symbian
Linux on the Toaster Oven? Is that anything like Linux on a dead badger?
As a mobile developer, your comment is hilarious. I'd mod it +5 funny, but few non-mobile software developers would get the joke. "Will be great"?
EVERYONE says that about their new upcoming mobile OS. Then it gets released, and we discover something seriously flawed about it. No APIs for custom hardware. Difficult path for porting pre-existing applications from other platforms over to it. Poor performance. Security flaws. Vendor lock-in. Insufficient API. Nonstandard. If you've ever seriously written an enterprise mobile app, you'd have a clue about this already. You frequently have to work with very custom hardware and software solutions, requiring a very major amount of flexibility and language/API maturity. So, if Google does it, that means everyone will just drop everything they're doing and furiously work to be compatible with it? Ha. Everyone will rewrite their application that their customers have been using for years because Google made a mobile OS? Nope...every company I've worked for in the past couple years decided when getting me to work on their project that Windows Mobile "might be worth investing the time into". It takes a heck of a long time to catch on, and an even longer time to get companies to devote resources into developing for it. If you aren't following an open standard with plenty of information readily available, it takes even longer.
That's most likely the road that Android is going to take. Just because Google is behind it doesn't mean that it will be used by anyone. Lots of Google's side projects end up by the wayside. And just because it comes from Google doesn't mean it'll be "great", either. Maybe Android will end up on Blackberries in a couple years or so.