Motorola is seemingly positioning Linux to be its default platform for mobile innovation. The cell phone giant has been using Linux on its cell phones since 2003, but the open source OS is now to become more important.
For Motorola, its not just about reduced cost of acquisition or the lack of a royalty cost - its about Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Freescale (principal chip manufacturers) being behind the OS as well. Vendors such as Opera and Macromedia have Linux ports in the market as well.
"There is nobody telling you with Linux that you can't have feature a,b,c or d," Mark VandenBrink, senior director and chief architect of mobile devices software at Motorola, said. "If you want to do an innovative application you can find people that will want to make it happen and you can put it in.
"It isn't a closed environment where someone controls the roadmap."
"We don't see Linux as taking away from any of the others," he said. "It's just that as we do more and more innovative things we tend to do those first on Linux."