LiMo Foundation News

  • Open Letter to the Wholesale Applications Community

     

    Dear Industry Colleagues:

    Further to the public announcement of 15 February 2010, I am very pleased to write this open letter to the initiators of the Wholesale Applications Community on behalf of the Board of LiMo Foundation offering a) our full support, b) our committed participation, and c) our immediate practical assistance in a spirit of whole-industry cooperation.

    It is clear to us that the highly complementary areas of focus, shared belief in true openness and common industry vision create an exceptional opportunity for deep and long-term collaboration between LiMo Foundation and the Wholesale Applications Community to release unfettered innovation across the industry and fully ignite the mobile internet in a way that is compelling and life-enhancing to consumers everywhere.

    LiMo Foundation was launched in 2007 as a constitutionally open, transparent and non-discriminatory industry consortium with the sole purpose of collaboratively delivering a competitive Linux-based device software platform to the industry upon which commercial innovation can freely thrive without brand or business model conflict with the underlying platform. Since LiMo’s launch, three major releases...
  • LiMo Foundation Handset Lineup Expands With New Feature-Rich Devices From ELSE, NEC, Panasonic

    Newest LiMo handsets combine style, durability, and in-demand high-performance functionality

    BARCELONA, Spain, February 15, 2010 – LiMo Foundation™, a global consortium of leading companies from throughout the mobile industry, today announced new LiMo compliant handsets from manufacturers ELSE, NEC, and Panasonic Mobile Communications. These models bring the number of LiMo devices announced to date to fifty.

    “We welcome the arrival of these innovative new devices which attest to the richness and versatility of LiMo Platform,” said Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation. “The continued growth of LiMo devices is further endorsement of LiMo’s vision, mission, and technologies.”

    Designed to appeal to consumers seeking elegant, feature-rich handsets, the new models combine next-generation functionality and reliable performance in an array of sleek, sophisticated device designs. Integrating advanced user interface technologies and critical functionality and reliability elements such as keypad-to-touchpad conversion, high-megapixel auto-focus cameras, waterproofing, and extended battery life will ensure a more immersive...
  • Mobile Industry Leaders Collaborate for On-Time Delivery of R3 LiMo Platform

    Latest release of mobile industry’s only independent handset platform imminently available

    BARCELONA, Spain, February 15, 2010 – LiMo Foundation, a global consortium of leading companies from throughout the mobile industry, today announced the imminent availability of the new R3 release of LiMo Platform. The updated platform features new support for Location Based Services (LBS) and contact management and extends existing features including support for application management, advanced UI and multimedia technologies, and enhanced security and networking.

    “Delivery of R3 of LiMo Platform is a further important delivery milestone and again for LiMo Foundation demonstrates that powerful likeminded companies can work together practically to create a common platform that is evolved and governed through a truly open and independent process,” said Morgan Gillis, executive director of LiMo Foundation. “This latest update to the LiMo Platform also furthers LiMo’s leadership in commercially unifying mobile Linux technologies for the benefit of the whole industry.”

LiMo at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009
Written by Lefty Schlesinger, Director of Open Source Technologies, ACCESS   
Monday, 27 July 2009 20:12

The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit is one of the major free and open source community events this year. Up until 2009, the GNOME desktop developers had the GUADEC conference, and the KDE developers had the AKaDEmy conference, in separate locations at different times. In order to provide greater opportunities for cross-desktop discussions, collective work on shared components, and general community building, it was decided to have both conferences at the same time, co-located in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. This year's conference(s) attracted over 1000 attendees, not just coders, but localizers, writers, marketers, legal experts, artists, photographers, and users who want to share feedback and talk to the people making the software they use.

Conferences like GUADEC and AKaDEmy (and FOSDEM, and LinuxTag, and a host of others, large and small, general and specialized, around the globe), are long-standing traditions. Some, like the Linux Symposium, the oldest of the community conferences, have an academic air, jury papers for inclusion and publish proceedings. Most are a lot more informal, but all include a combination of a series of presentations, demos, unstructured "birds of a feather" sessions on specific topics of shared interest, "lightning talks" (5 minute, single-topic presentations), some parties in the evenings and a lot of time and space to work on coding, designing, discussing and meeting other people face-to-face.


These conferences are a core part of open source community. Since much of the interaction between people—even those working on the same project—is mainly through email, or Internet Relay Chat, the opportunity to meet and interact in-person adds an important dynamic which helps foster and support the "rough meritocracy" by which the open source community operates.

 

The Desktop Summit was the first time that the LiMo Foundation was officially represented at a community conference. Andrew Savory, Technology Project Manager from the LiMo Foundation office attended, as did I, both as ACCESS' Director of Open Source Technologies and as the Foundation's Open Source Committee chair; engineers from Foundation member companies attended as well. In addition to attending many of the more mobile-related presentations and talks, Andrew and I participated in the "GNOME Mobile" meeting, where we discussed—along with as many as 60 other participants—the increasing use of open source code in mobile devices of all kinds, precisely the sort of direction which LiMo has been fostering and promoting, and is executing on with the recently announced reference implementations being used by Foundation members for ongoing development.

As a member of the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board, I also had the opportunity to update other Foundation Board members of the progress which the LiMo Foundation has made to date, and our upcoming plans, and there is general agreement that we'll be coordinating our efforts more closely in the future.

Less formally, Andrew and I had many opportunities to meet developers on projects and components used in LiMo devices, things like GTK+, Gstreamer, BlueZ, D-Bus and other components. We got the opportunity to explain what LiMo is about, and answer questions about the direction of the Foundation, in a "grassroots" way.

Broadening and deepening such coordination and communication is a clear ongoing direction for the Foundation, as is increased interaction with, and support of, the open source development community. The reference implementations in use by Foundation members contain upwards of 70% open source, community-developed-and-maintained code, and these are the people with whom the Foundation works, collaboratively, to develop and deploy code now shipping on dozens of devices from Foundation members. We all have things to teach and things to learn from one another, and conferences like the Desktop Summit are key opportunities for the LiMo Foundation to engage with the open source development community.

 

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