The Cloudy Future Of Mobile Linux

ComputerWorld has a piece on mobile Linux, the pluses and minuses of the platform as well as its strengths and weaknesses. The tone of the article is whether it can move from being the OS on low-end feature phones to running a smartphone. I think the big things on its side are Motorola, which has put a lot of weight behind it, and the fact that Vodafone has listed it as one of its three supported operating systems (although that was left out of the article) — a big handset vendor and a big operator.
The minus side appears to be a lack of direction…”The problem with Linux has been that it doesn’t have any one owner,” said Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “What you need are specific profiles that define the target device. Microsoft has that with smart phones and Pocket PCs. Developers can develop [applications] and be sure they’ll work. Symbian has it, too. But since Linux developers have been so focused on open source, they haven’t created these profiles…There are a lot of good intentions but, when it gets down to it, [Linux vendors] want to fight among themselves,” Dulaney said. “In the consumer market, sure, there will be Linux. But the prospect of continued fragmentation in the developer community is very high.”

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