ARM, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments have together created Linaro, a not-for-profit company focused on supporting the development of open-source products for devices powered by ARM’s chip designs. Along with Android, other open-source ventures, including LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS, stand to profit from the project, which will help unify a fragmented Linux mobile operating system market.
In a June 3 statement on the partnership, the six explained that open-source software communities have traditionally faced a problem of limited choices in processor platforms. With the formation of Linaro, the hope is to make it quicker and easier to develop advanced products by creating software commonalities across ARM-based semiconductor SoCs (system-on-chips).