Freescale, others join open source mobile Linux effort

In an effort to effectively battle competitors and make a Linux-based operating system available for mobile phones, the Linux Mobile Foundation (LiMo) announced it has added several new members.

The most significant additions to the organization are Telecom Italia, Freescale Semiconductor, and PacketVideo, although Cellon, Escmertec, Loncheer Holdings, MIZI Research, Movial Corporation, SK Innoace, VirtualLogix, and ZTE also joined the effort.

LiMo now has more than 50 contributing members. After the demise of the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS) earlier in the year, LiMo acquired its members, with nine of its eleven new partners coming from LiPS.

Rather than try to recruit members that are all in the same field, LiMo has been careful to select a balanced number of companies that will each be able to bring something unique to the table for future development. For example, Loncheer Holdings, ZTE, and Cellon will be responsible for helping LiMo promote its technologies in the explosive Chinese mobile phone market. SK Innoace and MIZI Research were brought on board to help LiMo develop better technology to sync mobile phones with desktop PCs for file transfers. Packet Video, Movial, VirtualLogic, and Esmertec will be creating open source programs, ranging from virtualization to more consumer-based products, for phones running LiMo software.

The open source mobile phone community is rather complicated, due to a multiplicity of concurrent organizations with similar or equivalent motives, though LiMo is one of the largest. Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung Electronics, Vodafone, and Panasonic created the LiMo Platform in 2007 with the aim of creating a new mobile operating system that is open source Linux-based. But the situation is tangled even further by the fact that many companies belong to more than one Linux advocacy organization.

The mobile ecosystem likely will only get more confusing in the future, with Symbian adopting a new open source business model, along with the anticipated Google Android phone software release scheduled before the end of 2008. The Symbian Foundation has only 31 contributing companies, though they collectively represent a wider variety of phone models that support Symbian software. While LiMo and Google's Open Handset Alliance (OHA) have similar goals for the future, both organizations are using different techniques to gain success.

LiMo will be in San Francisco this week during LinuxWorld in an effort to talk with prospective new members.