LIBERTYVILLE, Ill.—Motorola Inc. and a handful of handset vendors, along with two major network operators, have agreed to establish a global Linux-based software platform for mobile devices, the companies involved announced.
The alliance, which plans to solicit more participants, could stand directly against other operating system vendors including Symbian Ltd. (partly owned by Nokia Corp.) and Microsoft Corp., which makes the Windows Mobile OS.
Motorola, second only to Nokia in global market share for mobile handsets, was joined by Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., the world’s third-largest handset maker, NEC Corp. and Panasonic Mobile Communications (a subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.). Vodafone Group plc and NTT DoCoMo Inc. joined on the operator side. Vodafone, based in the United Kingdom, is one of the world’s largest network operator and Japanese carrier DoCoMo is known as one of the most innovative.
The Linux alliance aims to lower development costs and foster a mobile ecosystem among interested companies, including application developers, across the value chain. Specifically, the alliance will focus on the joint development and marketing of an application programming interface specification and architecture that will support source code-based reference designs, components and tools to leverage both community-based and proprietary development.
A trend towards such alliances is underway as sophisticated mobile phones with advanced features raise development costs for handset vendors. Such vendors have been seeking reference designs that can be easily tweaked to meet the shifting demands of their main customers, the network operators.
