Industry Perspective: Bill Weinberg, Mobile Linux conference head

Bill Weinberg

Linux World kicks off on Monday in San Francisco and for the first time an entire conference will be devoted to the mobile iteration of the technology. The decision to branch off on its own comes after the market for mobile Linux in the U.S. has been gaining traction of late. The Linux Mobile (LiMo) Foundation and Open Handset Alliance (OHA) have continued to attract support for the platform. Meanwhile, Google’s operating system, Android, has been taking the lion’s share of attention. Bill Weinberg, Mobile Linux weatherman at the Linux Foundation and Linux World conference head, spoke with Associate News Editor Sarah Reedy about the opportunity for Linux in the United States, as well as what will themes and issues will bring attendees to the show floor come next week.

On Linux’s mobile traction: Linux is doing very well in mobile. There’s a lot of phone shipping; lots of different stacks that have Linux integrated to a greater or lesser extent. The ones that are most prominent are, of course, the consortium-based LiMo stack, the Android stack from Google and the Open Handset Alliance and then other Java stacks like the JavaFX and NEC. In parallel with these community and consortium-based entities that are building either their individual phones or individual platforms based on Linux are the companies that are typically members of these other consortiums. So you have Access, Zingo, Palm even has their own – there are eight or nine of them, all consolidating around the APIs and feature sets that are predicated by these community or consortium-based platform definitions.

On misplaced fears of a Symbian take-over: There was some open source gloom and doom. Some members of the press and others were saying, ‘now that Symbian does so well in Europe and it’s open source, it’ll take over the world.’ But just like when Sun opened Solaris, people were predicting all sorts of dire consequences for Linux and the enterprise, and open source so far has catered to the traditional audiences of Solaris, and it’s proprietary in closed form. I think that is what you will see from Symbian. People will still go to Linux for more flexibility and to be able to leverage the fruits of different ecosystems. Linux, as a mobile operating system, benefits greatly from the fact that it is a very important enterprise OS. It is dominant in the server room for large slots of the application space. It is also the dominant embedded OS. A quarter of all 32 and 64-bit applications are being built and deployed on Linux. It is a real natural fit for smartphones and increasingly mid-tier phones.