Vendors form Linaro to promote Linux based devices

Stuart Corner
Friday, 04 June 2010 16:03

IT Industry - Strategy

ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments have formed a non-profit company, Linaro, to promote Linux-based distributions such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS in a wide range of devices from cellphones to automotive and enterprise systems.

Linaro (www.linaro.org) is billed as a not-for-profit open source software engineering company dedicated to enhancing open source innovation for the next wave of always-connected, always-on computing. It promises to help developers and manufacturers provide consumers with more choice, more responsive devices and more diverse applications on Linux-based systems.

The founders are inviting other organisations to join and say that Linaro will "provide a stable and optimised base for distributions and developers by creating new releases of optimised tools, kernel and middleware software validated for a wide range of SoCs, every six months."

These will be "applicable to a wide range of markets, helping reduce time-to-market for products such as smart phones, tablets, digital televisions, automotive entertainment and enterprise equipment."

They plan to release Linaro's first software and tools in November 2010, providing optimisations for the latest range of ARM Cortex-A family of processors.

Linaro's founders argue that, traditionally, the Linux and open-source software communities have focused on solving the software problems of enterprise and computing markets with a limited choice of processor platforms. But the open source community is transitioning to create advanced web-centric consumer devices using high profile open source based distributions and a wide range of high-performance, low-power ARM-based SoCs.

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