Oh boy, here we go again. Every year we write about companies tinkering around with Linux in order to provide the market with an “alternative” open operating system that anyone can use. Nokia kicked things off with their tablet like devices that ran an operating system called Maemo. Intel was also working on their own mobile Linux operating system known as Mobiln. In 2010 both distributions merged and gave birth to MeeGo, which would have been successful if Nokia had the balls to depend on it for their future portfolio of smartphones. Sadly for them a former Microsoft employee is now CEO, and he’s decided to bet the future of the Finnish handset maker on Windows Phone. While all this is going on there’s a also third distribution called LiMo that’s also trying to become important. People paid attention to them when they launched in 2007 since they had a massive amount of companies who agreed to support the project, but then a failure to invest adequate resources by said companies made LiMo become irrelevant.
With that backstory now in your mind, say hello to Tizen, which merges MeeGo with LiMo and has the backing of Intel and Samsung. It’ll be hosted by the Linux Foundation, and unlike MeeGo, which depending on Qt for applications, Tizen is based on the belief that HTML5 applications will rule the day. In that respect it’s kind of like webOS. When will it hit the market? If everything goes to plan, and with Linux geeks it never does, then Q1 2012.
Should you care about this? No. Not in the slightest. Android, iOS, and soon Windows Phone, are really the only platforms that have a roadmap that stretches out farther than 12 months into the future. Intel is backing Tizen because at the end of the day they want to sell more silicon. Same goes to Samsung, who is already building devices based on mobile Linux with an operating system you might have heard of: Bada.
Update: “Tizen means two asses in Lebanese.” And yes, we know Android is based on Linux, but the way Google completely ignores the community and controls the roadmap means it’s far from open.
[Via: MeeGo Blog, PhoneScoop, Anandtech, Tizen]