Linux Targets Mobile Networking

Linux has made great strides in taking over servers in the data center. Now the mighty penguin is fishing for another market--advanced cell phones and other mobile devices.

Open Source Development Labs, which employs Linux creator Linus Torvalds, last week said it has brought together Motorola Inc. and several other high-tech vendors to develop a Linux platform for sophisticated cellular phones and other mobile devices.

Members of the OSDL working group, called the Mobile Linux Initiative, also include MontaVista Software, PalmSource, Trolltech, and Wind River. The participants plan to develop a base-level platform upon which handset manufacturers can build, says Dave Rosenberg, an analyst for the labs. Requirements for the open-source operating system would include power management to increase battery life, a standard interface for connecting to the various carrier networks, and other basic functions that would have to be crammed into an operating system that runs in devices with limited memory.

Participants have built their own Linux-based operating systems, but the idea is to collaborate on a single platform to make that platform a stronger competitor. Much like in the Linux computer world, software vendors would make money on applications built on the operating system.

"A lot of this is a unification of all these efforts into a base platform that meets the needs of more than one vendor," Rosenberg says. "There really is no vendor-neutral development on [mobile] Linux. They're all different."Broader use of Linux has been hampered by not having a single platform, says Avi Greengart, an analyst for market researcher Current Analysis. Most handset manufacturers that have to build their own Linux-based operating system lose many of the advantages of a standards-based, open-source technology that's available at no charge. "The problem has always been there's more promise than delivery with Linux" on mobile devices, Greengart says. "You end up doing a lot of low-level programming yourself."

Reducing development time is a key selling point for Microsoft, which is marketing Windows Mobile "very, very aggressively" in Europe and the United States, Greengart says. Microsoft's advantage is its development tools, which help bring applications to market sooner.

Symbian, an open industry-standard operating system for data-enabled mobile phones, also is proprietary, but it, too, delivers much of what a handset maker needs.

Aside from Motorola, there are no major manufacturers in the OSDL group. For the effort to succeed, it will need to sign up companies such as LG Electronics, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson, Greengart says.

PalmSource, which makes the Palm operating system, could give the initiative a boost. The company in February bought China MobileSoft Ltd., which is developing a Chinese version of Linux for that country's growing cellular-phone market.And Nokia, even though it uses Symbian in smart phones, in May released a mobile device called the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet on Linux. Analysts say the tablet is an indication that Nokia could be planning a Linux-based mobile phone.