ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments have formed a not-for-profit software engineering company called Linaro. It plans to make Linux-based development faster and easier, with a focus on ARM chips.
The new partnership is committed to investing in open source projects that can be used by Linux-based distributions, such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS. Its software and tools will be available for a variety of devices that utilise semiconductor System-on-Chips (SoCs), including smartphones, tablets, digital televisions, automotive entertainment and enterprise equipment.
Linaro's first release of software and tools is due out in November 2010.
Warren East, CEO of ARM, said "ARM and our partners have a long history of working with, and supporting, open source software development for complex SoCs based on the ARM architecture. As a founding member of Linaro, we are working together with the broader open source community to accelerate innovation for the next generation of computing, focusing on delivering a rich connected experience across the diversity of devices in our daily lives."