Linux and open source are becoming increasingly important in the mobile world and starting to gain credibility among large carriers for the first time, despite continuing serious flaws such as poor synchronization with desktop systems. The various Linux factions are jockeying for position in the mobile world, and the open source OS is becoming the latest weapon in the political battles of the wireless giants. Intel’s recent announcement of its first Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) architecture running Windows gave a huge boost to the Gnome Foundation’s Linux desktop environment – the promised non-Windows device runs a cutdown version of Gnome with a custom skin. Hard on the heels of that coup, the Foundation has thrown its support behind the Gnome Mobile & Embedded Initiative (GMAE), which aims to develop and commercialize Gnome components for these markets, and put the framework into the front line of mobile Linux standards.
Intel, of course, is one of the giants pledging support, and is joined by Nokia, Red Hat, Access (owner of the former Palmsource, and creating a Palm-based user interface for Linux, which could offer some interesting input to the Gnome project). Other open source projects such as OpenMoko will also be involved, and GMAE has also gained endorsement from the industry bodies LiPS (Linux Phone Standards) Forum, and Linux Foundation. These bodies, though they have not achieved significant commercial weight, do between them include most of the mobile majors, but so far the handset giants, apart from Nokia, have not got behind GMAE except via this tangential link. This suggests that the Gnome initiative may prove to be another step in the political polarization of the mobile Linux community – as the big names strive to move away from the fragmentation caused by the early, specialized mobile distributions, they are also locked in battle to influence which flavor of Linux will become the effective standard, for the OS and for crucial higher layers such as user interface.
This is important not just to provide a balance to Windows and Symbian in the smartphone and ultra-mobile PC sectors, but because Linux is expected to be the OS of choice, and to accelerate the creation of, new generations of entirely different kinds of device, particularly low cost and low power gadgets for emerging markets. Jeff Waugh, founder of the GMAE initiative and a director of the Gnome Foundation board, commented in a statement: “Developers will not only have the means to create great mobile and embedded software, but the freedom to envision and create fundamentally new kinds of devices, for entirely new markets.”
The GMAE platform will launch as a subset of the Gnome platform, but GMAE developers plan to expand it to enable new features. Elements under consideration include the JavaME, the GeoClue geolocation service, the PulseAudio audio management function and the Tinymail mobile email system. The GMAE platform will be distributed under LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) terms, which allow for royalty-free use of the technology but encourages contribution of platform code changes to the Gnome community.
This is the open source licensing program likely to be used by Sun for open sourcing mobile Java, a decision that would set it against Motorola, which aims to make the rival Apache Foundation process the de facto standard for the cellular world (the handset maker announced its support for Apache as the process for mobile Java stacks last November and made it clear it hoped the rest of the industry would follow suit and also use Apache for other open source products, seeking to seize the initiative from Nokia, which had been making the running in Linux and open Java.
The GPL has advantages in the mobile world, which has seen both Linux and Java beset by fragmentation. By requiring that derivative works also be released as open source, the GPL discourages commercial forking, which could held reduce lack of cross-platform compatibility. But it could also deter some commercial developers by forcing them to release their code freely.
This is only one of the issues in which Motorola has tried to make itself the driver of the mobile open source evolution, and the handset maker’s response to the formation of GMAE will be critical and telling. The company has recently made major commitments to Linux – while Nokia is embracing the system mainly for enterprise products such as its Internet Tablets rather than for mainstream smartphones, where it still has huge interests in Symbian, Motorola is more wholehearted about Linux and became the first major, with the launch of RIZR Z6, to run the OS on a single-processor architecture, indicating its improvements in the ability to run on compact devices.
The most important of the many bodies in which Motorola is dabbling in order to pursue its open source ambitions is the LiMo Foundation, formed last June to establish standards for cellphone Linux, and claiming the first real possibility of a unified version of the open source operating system. It will be important, if the Gnome platform is to gain credibility on the handset – rather than just the mini-PC architectures that Intel and Nokia are espousing in the enterprise – that it forms close ties with LiMo, and Motorola will be important in this. Other founder members are the other leading Linux phonemakers – Samsung, NEC and Panasonic – and two mega-operators, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone, both of which have named Linux among their preferred OSs for smartphones.
During the course of this year, LiMo will define an application programming interface; architecture; references to open sourcecode; new sourcecode-based reference implementation components (to be contributed by Foundation members); and specifications for referenced third party software. With this, it will publish specifications that define a common, low level, Linux-based operating system and will distribute test suites to help phonemakers and software developers self-certify their products. The APIs will be licensed to members, royalty-free, using a ‘Foundation Public License’ (FPL), while the kernel and middleware will remain under open source licenses such as the GPL. Like the GPL, the FPL requires that modifications be contributed back on a non-discriminatory basis to all other Foundation members, but it also forbids sourcecode distribution to non-members under any terms.
Other mobile Linux efforts could now be sidelined or incorporated into LiMo, unless Nokia or Microsoft decides to put weight behind one of them as a counterweight to Motorola and the Asian Linux pioneers. The main activities are:
‘ Trolltech with the Greensuite platform
‘ Access with Access Linux, whose main differentiator is the advanced user interface based on the former Palm UI. Japan’s Access also offers the open source Hiker Application Framework, which brings many PalmOS-like UI characteristics to Linux, including mechanisms for saving and shutting down one application and hot-launching another, adapting the experience to the task-based nature of mobile devices.
‘ The Linux Foundation (formerly known as OSDL) with its Mobile Linux Initiative. This could coexist with LiMo since it mainly focuses on kernel level standards. Motorola and PalmSource were the first vendors to join the MLI in October 2005, hoping to drive adoption by providing a robust Linux kernel that could efficiently use processor and electrical power in devices.
‘ The Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS), which mainly concentrates on middleware
None of these has gained much commercial weight, indicating, perhaps, that the full open source model is not appropriate to the particular economics and pressures of the handset market, in the same way as it is for PCs and servers. As such – like mobile Java activities – LiMo shows mobile Linux compromising on the ideals of pure open source, but introducing a semi-closed approach that has a better chance of widespread adoption and therefore of gaining harmonization, price benefits and a solid ecosystem, and so providing a robust smartphone alternative to Windows and SymbianOS.