Motorola backs open source mobile platforms.

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 24 June 2006 03:21

IT Industry - Strategy

Motorola has joined the Eclipse Foundation, a not-for profit organisation set up to provide an open source platform for application framework for software development.

The move follows an announcement last week by Motorola, Samsung, NEC and Panasonic, Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo to create a consistent Linux-based platform for mobile handsets and to set up a foundation to support it.

Mobile has become a strategic developer member of Eclipse and will hold a seat on the board and will participate in the Architecture, Requirements, and Planning Councils of the Foundation.

Motorola is also working with the Eclipse Foundation to propose an Eclipse Tools for mobile Linux project to provide the extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for the development of C++ applications for mobile devices.

Motorola will contribute software, engineering resources, and its mobile expertise to work with the Eclipse community and across the mobile industry, to "develop a comprehensive development environment for mobile Linux platforms".

"With the support of the Eclipse community, Motorola hopes to drive frameworks and tools to support all phases of the application lifecycle for developers creating and deploying C/C++ applications targeting mobile Linux platforms," said Christy Wyatt, vice president ecosystem development, Motorola Mobile Devices.

He added "Over time, we hope the Eclipse TmL project will provide a home for mobile Linux extensions across a wide range of existing and future Eclipse projects."

 Mike Milinkovich, executive director, Eclipse Foundation, said: "Mobile Linux is an extremely compelling initiative and Eclipse is pleased to be working towards offering developers extended options to develop in this environment."

Motorola recently launched Motodev, a global developer and ISV program, and opensource.motorola.com, a new resource aimed at sharing source code, original Motorola open source projects and new ideas and information with developers around the world. The site features source code, including kernel and drivers, for Motorola's Linux-based devices.

The Eclipse Foundation was set up in 2001 by Borland, IBM, Merant, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, Red Hat, SuSE, TogetherSoft and Webgain as a consortium when IBM released its Eclipse Platform into Open Source. These companies formed and initial 'Board of Stewards. By the end of 2003, this initial consortium had grown to over 80 members. In February 2004 the Eclipse Board of Stewards announced Eclipse's reorganisation into a not-for-profit corporation.

With this change, a full-time Eclipse management organisation was established to engage with commercial developers and consumers, academic and research institutions, standards bodies, tool interoperability groups and individual developers and to coordinate the open source projects.

Today Eclipse claims to have the support of over 115 member companies and hosts nine major open source projects that include a total of over 50 subprojects. All technology and source code provided to and developed by this community is made available royalty-free via the Eclipse Public License.