August 14th, 2009
Will mobile Linux distros hang separately?
HTC has had its Android phone out for months now, and there’s great excitement over the coming kit from Motorola.
Panasonic and NEC are out with new LiMo gear. Intel and Novell are both pushing the Moblin platform. Nokia is pushing Linux in the new Maemo phones.
But what are the chances you will be able to move software among these various phones? (Tux is holding a Treo in this picture from Palminfocenter.com.)
I am not a programmer. The job may be trivial. But until we know what is involved in doing the job the job cannot be done. And right now we don’t know what will be necessary.
The question for this weekend is, are these mobile Linux vendors making a big mistake by not collaborating more? Apple is still killing them, developer attention is not unlimited, Microsoft hearts developers, and Palm is still in the game.
Even taken together, the market share of all these Linux phones by the end of next year may be trivial next to what is being piled up by the competition. But these Linux phones can’t be taken together. They are all tied to different distributions. They all stand alone.
This is just what happened with Unix back in the day. The software was great, but each vendor had their own way of doing things, so the market never really developed. Unix did not hang together and so each vendor hung separately.
Is this about to happen with mobile Linux?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 08/14/09
