A new company has been formed by the leading semiconductor System-on-Chips (SoCs) developers like ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments. It’s called Linaro and it’s made to speed the rollout of Linux-based devices. My first reaction was “Here’s another LiMo Foundation,” but I figured that’s not the case after reading the whole press release. What Linaro, which BTW was formed as a not-for-profit company, will do is invest resources in open source projects that can then be used by other mobile Linux-based operating systems such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS. More precisely, Linaro will provide a stable and optimized base for distributions and developers by creating new releases of optimized tools, kernel and middleware software validated for a wide range of SoCs, every six months, with the first release due out in November of this year. In other words, the companies are joining forces to reduce time-to-market for all parties involved — device makers, platform providers and other companies in the ecosystem.
And it’s not just mobile phones Linaro is targeting, it’s also tablets, digital TV sets, automotive entertainment products and enterprise equipment… You can get the full press release from Linaro’s new website.
My two cents is actually a question – where’s Qualcomm in this? They are one of the leading chip makers and their Snapdragon processor is definitely one of the most popular SoC solutions on the market, yet they are not involved. Not interested or what?