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Hardware Companies Team Up To Fight Mobile Linux Fragmentation
Nunavut writes with news that a number of hardware companies have banded together to battle the fragmentation of the mobile Linux market. ARM, Freescale Semiconductor, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments are forming Linaro, a nonprofit organization that plans to focus on "low-level software around the Linux kernel that touches the silicon, key pieces of middleware that enable new markets, and tools that help the developer write and debug code."
"Linaro's chief goal is to reduce the time that it takes to bring a new ARM-powered product to market with Linux. This effort is largely neutral with respect to what software environment and components individual vendors choose to run in user space. Linaro will not compete with existing platforms such as MeeGo and Android. Instead, it will attempt to improve the shared underlying software components that allow those platforms and others to run on ARM SoCs. In principle, this could actually reduce fragmentation at the lower levels of the Linux stack."
What in god's name are you blathering about? This is a non profit organization that intends to deal with low level hardware libraries. It has nothing to do with "apps" and they have no intention of shipping a product. All of this is right in the summary.
Given the membership and their statements, it actually sounds like they might be working on integrating/standardizing the access to underlying hardware. Most of those manufacturers make ARM chips with various added peripherals. It would certainly save time if I could grab a Linux distro that was everything below the UI level without having to spend time integrating the low level chip libraries to access the custom hardware functions in the chip.