Mobile Linux Losers
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When I see companies with falling performance partnering, I think of every mad slasher film Hollywood have ever coughed-up. The scene is predictable. A bunch of frightened girls huddle together while a chainsaw wielding maniac slaughters them one-by-one.
At least that is the image that flashed through my mind when I saw a pair of LinuxWorld-timed press releases from Wind River. Don’t get me wrong, I like the folks at Wind River and since they are in my back yard I know many of their employees. But internal scuttlebutt indicates a lack of Open Source enthusiasm at Wind River as the proprietary factions within the company either do little to promote embedded Linux, or actually hinder the process.
So this week we see Palm’s latest product misconception, the Foleo line, adopting Wind River for future development and deployment. As a niche product, enough bad things cannot be said about Foleo, and they all have been uttered already. If in the face of LinuxWorld this is the best news Wind River can generate, it says much about industry adoption of their embedded Linux development tools.
The other, slightly more hopeful note came from a joint announcement with Motorola (a company who rapidly lost its lead in the mobile market) in joining the LiMo (LInux MObile) Foundation, yet another group seeking to standardize Linux for their own sake. Though LiMo has a list of interesting co-conspirators (like DoCoMo, Samsung and others), the success of this group will depend not on standardizing a mobile Linux platform than by bringing new capabilities to market. Currently, propritary mobile platforms are innovating the user mobile experience (think iPhones and BlackBerrys) and turning cellphones into the Unified Communication Hub. Now if they could just get young girls to use hands-free kits while driving, I’d feel a lot safer crossing the street.
In other words, handheld infrastructure is not the big issue, and a standards group will only help sell more embedded Linux if it in some way facilitates more rapid and creative application development.
This is where LiPS (Linux Phone Standards) comes in. Already releasing the first LiPS specification, they have moved into the market some standards as well as a set of widgets and applications. In other words, LiPS has already kissed the mobile application space (sorry, some puns cannot be helped).
It is somewhat disheartening to see multiple organizations seeking to “standardize” anything, especially Linux. And I cannot help but wonder about the motivations for launching LiMo after LiPS has delivered solutions.
Regardless, the mass interest in mobile Linux is wonderfully reminiscent of the early days of server-based Linux (which never developed for desktop Linux oddly enough). We see a mad scramble of current and former heavyweight competitors all seeking to make Linux more meaningful and usable in a specific market. Mobile is still open to innovation and given the incredible price pressure in this consumer market, Linux is a natural fit. Being a betting man, I’m confident that Linux will usurp all other mobile platforms with the possible exception of Microsoft’s, and even on that I’m willing to wager.
