Open source operating systems are suddenly flourishing, especially in the growing netbook and smartphone arenas, and it looks like significant competition between them will lead to much innovation. Moblin, the open source mobile platform launched by Intel and now overseen by The Linux Foundation, is making tremendous strides, and is out in a refreshed beta version 2.0. The platform has been gaining a lot of momentum, with Acer announcing that it will put it on a broad range of laptops, netbooks and PCs, Moblin mediaphone devices in the works, in-car infotainment systems based on it, and more.
Android, Google’s open source mobile operating system, is also picking up momentum, with more than 30 smartphone handsets running it expected by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Google has just announced that it will deliver Chrome OS — also open source — in 2010, aimed at the hot netbook market. And Symbian, which has almost half of the global smartphone market, has announced that it is moving into beta testing with its open source Symbian 2 OS. These operating systems are all different, and here’s what to expect from them:
Moblin
Moblin has a substantial amount of backing from influential industry players. On the open source front, where application development for it will be especially important, it’s very good news that Intel (which launched Moblin as a mobile Linux initiative) has passed stewardship of it over to The Linux Foundation. Moblin has its own steering committee at The Linux Foundation, which has done an excellent job over the past several years of federating and organizing open source development for Linux platforms.
Novell is teaming with Intel to encourage Moblin adoption. The two companies will encourage hardware OEMs to use the platform in an array of new types of devices, with hot-selling netbooks at the top of the priority list. It’s likely that many of those systems could run Intel’s Atom processors. Matt Asay at The Open Road blog has said that he thinks Novell and Intel together can take square aim at the momentum that Google’s Android open source operating system has. Moblin will also square off with Google’s Chrome OS when it arrives next year.