“In the open source world, leading off an elevator pitch with a
line like “six industry giants ARM, IBM, Texas Instruments,
Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and Freescale founded a not-for-profit open
source engineering organization…” is just bound to start an
argument.“After all, there are elements within the open source community
who eschew large corporate players with the same enthusiasm devoted
to avoiding the plague. At best, even the least cynical among the
community might flinch a bit at such a weighty pronouncement. Not
just one industry giant, but six?“And yet, that’s what Linaro is about, and they’re proud of
it.“At first blush, Linaro comes across as yet-another-embedded
consortium trying to get their version of hardware/software
standards more firmly placed in the marketplace. Superficially,
that seems a fair assessment, but take another look and you’ve
really got an organization that’s waded into the trenches of
embedded Linux and is trying to make sense of it all.”