The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initative

[Jeff Waugh <jdub gnome org>]

The following press release and quote sheet, as well as a selection of
supporting press releases from GMAE members, are available on the web:

  http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/

- Jeff


THE GNOME FOUNDATION AND INDUSTRY LEADERS JOIN TO CREATE GNOME MOBILE &
EMBEDDED INITIATIVE

Developers and Corporations Unite to Advance GNOME Technology as Leading
User Experience Platform for Mobile and Embedded Devices.


Embedded Linux Conference, Santa Clara, USA -- April 19, 2007 -- The GNOME
Foundation announced today the creation of the GNOME Mobile & Embedded
Initiative (GMAE), and a software platform for user experience development
across a wide range of device profiles.

"GNOME continues to drive the cutting edge of Open Source and Free Software
innovation. With the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative, GNOME expands the
reach of Software Freedom to new devices, new markets, and new audiences",
said Jeff Waugh, founder of the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative and a
director of the GNOME Foundation board. "Developers will not only have the
means to create great mobile and embedded software, but the freedom to
envision and create fundamentally new kinds of devices, for entirely new
markets."

Mobile, embedded and converged devices comprise one of the most rapidly
growing segments of the technology landscape, accounting for sales of
billions of units per year. Analysts estimate that by 2010, one out of two
smartphones will be based on Free and Open source software, and growth in
this space is already faster than that of proprietary devices (Canalys,
2006). The mobile and embedded device space represents an unprecedented
opportunity for third-party developers.


Mission
=======

The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative will advance the use, development and
commercialization of GNOME components as a mobile and embedded user
experience platform. It brings together industry leaders, expert
consultants, key developers and the community and industry organizations
they represent. The initiative aims to:

 * Increase community and commercial visibility of GMAE technology and
   participating organizations.

 * Coordinate investment in the GTK+ and GNOME platform, documentation and
   developer tools.

 * Increase development focus on the "mobile experience", particularly the
   integration of GNOME desktop and GMAE technology.

 * Facilitate healthy development collaboration between participating
   organizations, the GNOME community and related projects; and between
   GNOME platform, desktop and GMAE developers.

 * Pursue standardization opportunities for the platform, and potentially at
   the user experience level.

 * Ensure that Software Freedom is a reality beyond the desktop, and
   available in the hands of users around the world.


Participants
============

"This initiative augments a thriving commercial and community ecosystem
around GNOME for mobile and embedded applications", noted Bill Weinberg,
Principal Analyst at LinuxPundit. "Building on freely-licensed GTK+,
GStreamer, and other GNOME software, the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative
provides a level playing field for companies and developers, for products
and projects, offering a platform for innovation and collaboration."

Founding organizations announcing their participation today include GNOME
Foundation supporters ACCESS, Canonical, Debian, Igalia, Imendio, Intel,
Nokia, OLPC, OpenedHand and Red Hat, and GMAE contributors CodeThink,
Collabora, FIC, Fluendo, Kernel Concepts, Movial, Nomovok, Openismus,
Vernier, Waugh Partners and Wolfson Microelectronics.

Bridging industry and community, the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative
involves Open Source projects such as Avahi, BlueZ, Cairo, GNOME, GPE,
GStreamer, GTK+, Hildon, Maemo, Matchbox, OpenMoko, Telepathy and Tinymail;
and industry organisations CELF, the Linux Foundation and LiPS.

A number of additional participants will announce their involvement at a
later date, due to product schedules and other disclosure issues.


Platform
========

The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Platform is a subset of the proven, widely used
GNOME Platform. In addition to the core user experience toolkit (GTK+), the
platform includes crucial functionality such as multimedia support
(GStreamer), instant messaging and presence (Telepathy), Bluetooth (BlueZ),
contacts and calendaring (E-D-S), and network service discovery (Avahi).
APIs are available for developers using C, C++ or Python.

Following GNOME's highly successful licensing strategy, the GNOME Mobile &
Embedded Platform is distributed under the terms of the LGPL, which allows
for royalty-free use in proprietary software products, but encourages
contribution of platform code changes back to the community. This, combined
with a thriving open development process supported by industry and
community, makes the GMAE Platform uniquely suited to the needs of mobile
and embedded developers.

The platform definition announced today represents components that are
currently shipping in production devices, but GMAE participants are planning
to grow the platform aggressively in the next twelve months, to enable new
technologies and functionality. Components already under consideration
include the Java Mobile & Embedded platform (Java ME), a geolocation service
(GeoClue), a hardware information system (HAL), an audio management service
(PulseAudio), and a mobile email framework (Tinymail).

The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Platform is already a key technology component
in a wide range of products and projects, including those from GMAE
participants such as the Intel Mobile Internet Device (MID), the Nokia N770
and N800 web tablet, the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop, the OpenMoko
Neo1973 mobile phone, the Vernier LabQuest; the Sugar, Hildon and GPE user
interfaces; and the ACCESS Linux Platform.

As an open development community, GMAE participants are keen to hear from
other organisations and developers using these technologies. Please
introduce yourself to the community on our development mailing list, or
contact Jeff Waugh for more information (details below).


Industry & Community Support
============================

The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative enjoys strong support from industry
and community leaders:

 * "As Linux becomes increasingly important in the portable Internet device
   and mobile segments, the GNOME Mobile & Embedded initiative is imperative
   for the community to collaborate on building a strong experience for
   mobile device users. We look forward to contributing and participating in
   the initiative to advance Embedded Linux." -- Imad Sousou, Director of
   Open Source Technology Center, Intel

 * "GNOME is an active and truly open developer community creating
   innovative software. This is why Nokia joined the community and chose
   GNOME software as a foundation for the Maemo platform and our Internet
   Tablets. We are excited about the growing use of GNOME software in
   consumer devices. The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative will now take
   this further by bringing together community and industry to promote and
   coordinate the continued development of the GMAE platform." -- Ari
   Jaaksi, Director of Open Source Software Oprations, Nokia

 * "With OpenedHand's core business over the past five years being focused
   on the development and improvement of GNOME based embedded devices, we
   are extremely pleased to be part of the formation of the GNOME Mobile &
   Embedded Initiative. These technologies give device manufacturers
   unrivaled freedom and flexibility in device creation. GMAE further paves
   the way for collaboration between companies and the community to further
   innovations and benefit all involved." -- Matthew Allum, CEO, OpenedHand
   Ltd.

 * "As one of the oldest corporate contributors to the GNOME Project, Red
   Hat is excited to see GNOME move into new spaces beyond the desktop.
   We've seen the flexibility of the platform with the new UI we've created
   for the One Laptop per Child project, which is based on the blending of
   technologies that both GNOME and Red Hat bring to the table. GNOME will
   be an incredibly important technology in our drive to build new markets
   in the client space." -- Brian Stevens, CTO at Red Hat

 * "With its long term focus on simplified, usable human interfaces, the
   entrance of the GNOME project onto the mobile and embedded scene is a
   welcome one. Add in the widespread corporate and community support that
   the parent project enjoys, and the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative is
   a project to follow." -- Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst, RedMonk

For many more perspectives from industry and community, please see the quote
sheet accompanying this release.


More Information
================

More information about the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative can be found
at www.gnome.org/mobile.


About the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative
============================================

The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative advances the use, development and
commercialization of GNOME components as a mobile and embedded user
experience platform. It brings together industry leaders, expert
consultants, key developers and the community and industry organizations
they represent.  As an open development community, participants support the
GNOME Mobile & Embedded Platform, a subset of GNOME's proven, widely used
desktop platform, focusing on software components shipping in production
mobile and embedded products. More information about GMAE can be found at
www.gnome.org/mobile.


About the GNOME Foundation
==========================

Comprised of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading
companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting
the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit
organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to
the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap. More
information on the GNOME Foundation can be found at foundation.gnome.org.


Media Enquiries
===============

  GNOME Foundation Press Officer
  Jeff Waugh (Sydney, Australia. Currently in Santa Clara, CA.)
  Email: gnome-press-contact gnome org
  Mobile: +61 423 989 818


Quote Sheet
===========

 * "As an organization relying on GNOME technologies in our ACCESS Linux
   Platform product, and with a strong commitment to supporting and
   participating in the open source software development community, ACCESS
   is very pleased to be a founding member of the GNOME Mobile & Embedded
   Initiative. GMAE is uniquely community-driven, as well as uniquely about
   writing working open source code for the most-used pieces of technology
   in people's lives. It doesn't get much more exciting than that!" -- David
   "Lefty" Schlesinger, Director of Open Source Technologies, ACCESS Co.,
   Ltd.

 * "Linux based mobile and embedded devices are the future. The GNOME Mobile
   & Embedded Initiative is a great opportunity for the community to shape
   the mobile user experience. The BlueZ Project is proud to be part of GMAE
   and provide an unified access to the Bluetooth technology across desktop
   and embedded systems." -- Marcel Holtmann, BlueZ Project

 * "Cairo provides advanced 2D graphics rendering to the GNOME Mobile &
   Embedded Platform, making it easy to meet the visual demands of today's
   increasingly rich mobile applications. The Cairo community is grateful
   for contributions from GMAE participants which continually improve
   Cairo's performance on mobile devices." -- Carl Worth, maintainer of the
   Cairo graphics library

* "Canonical supports GNOME as a forum for collaboration around an open
  platform for mobile devices, from internet tablets to smartphones. We
  believe that the GNOME commitment to usability, which we share in the
  Ubuntu community, is an essential ingredient for the creation of mobile
  applications for mass market consumer devices." -- Jane Silber, COO,
  Canonical

 * "This announcement by the GNOME Foundation is a welcome addition to the
   Open Source community landscape. The CE Linux Forum is always happy to
   see effective community efforts organized and working. We look forward to
   working with this group to enhance the capability to use Linux in mobile
   phones." -- Tim Bird, Chair of the Architecture Group of the CE Linux
   Forum

 * "The choice of user-space on graphical embedded systems has long been a
   difficult and error-prone decision. With the GNOME Mobile & Embedded
   Initiative, the power of the GNOME desktop becomes available to the
   embedded world, of course as truly Open Source Software. The founding
   members of GMAE include open source project members, device manufacturers
   already using GNOME technologies and a number of consultancies who can
   provide expert guidance and services. Codethink has worked hard on
   bringing core GNOME and Freedesktop technologies such as HAL and D-Bus
   into the embedded sphere and is very excited to be part of this
   initiative." -- Rob Taylor, Director, Codethink Ltd.

 * "The embedded and mobile markets are adopting open source in general and
   GNOME in particular at an ever-increasing rate. By joining forces through
   the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative, knowledge and applications can be
   easily pooled to benefit the entire community. Real-time communications
   are an essential part of mobile devices and we're delighted to bring our
   expertise in this area to the initiative, and support our Telepathy
   communications framework as a key component of the platform." -- Philippe
   Kalaf, Director, Collabora Ltd.

 * "Debian has been distributing the GNOME desktop for almost ten years now,
   and releases more than 18,000 software packages for eleven architectures,
   including some embedded ones and more to come. With its commitment to
   Free Software and focus on the development of a truly universal operating
   system, the Debian project welcomes the GNOME Mobile & Embedded
   Initiative. We will help integrate the technologies developed into our
   system, which will benefit our users but also the dozens of Debian-based
   distributions, and especially embedded derivatives." -- Sam Hocevar,
   Debian Project Leader

 * "We built OpenMoko with the goal of creating a platform that has the
   potential to leapfrog the PC. For us, the work going on around the GNOME
   Mobile & Embedded Initative is fundamental to realizing this dream. It
   was the natural choice for us to base our architecture on, and begin to
   explore the implications of truly open mobile devices." -- Sean
   Moss-Pultz, OpenMoko Product Manager, FIC

 * "Seeing rapid uptake of the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative technology
   stack by embedded industry has been incredible. Fluendo is very happy to
   be a core part of this effort, in the form of being the primary force
   behind the GStreamer multimedia framework. We look forward to pushing the
   whole platform even further in collaboration with our GMAE partners and
   our customers." -- Pascal Pegaz, Co-founder Fluendo S.A.

 * "The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative is exactly what we need to create
   a powerful and reliable base for all the projects that make use of GNOME
   components on embedded and mobile devices already. It will help to
   improve the communication between the upstream GNOME developers and
   embedded project members and is quite likely to become a great new
   institiution improving the quality of Open Source software. Both the GPE
   and the GPE Phone Edition projects are really happy to see GMAE become
   true!" -- Florian Boor, GPE lead developer

 * "As a GNOME development company, we are very pleased to participate in
   GMAE.  We consider that this initiative will increase the synergies
   between the main actors working in the adoption of GNOME as technical
   platform for mobile devices. Making GNOME even more mobile-friendly,
   defining and evolving an innovative software platform for user experience
   development across a wide range of device profiles, will increase and
   diversify the use cases of the project technologies, benefiting both
   mobile and desktop users and developers". -- Juan José Sánchez Penas,
   co-founder of Igalia

 * "As a small company specializing in GTK+ and GNOME, Imendio is excited to
   be part of the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative. We hope to see this
   serve as an important bridge between the GNOME community and the embedded
   market as well as a marketplace for further cooperation between the
   involved parties.  With our deep roots in GNOME, we are thrilled to see
   the project take this important step towards new platforms." -- Mikael
   Hallendal, CEO Imendio AB

 * "In recent years we've seen Linux spread from the server to the desktop.
   To a large extent the success on the desktop was due to the GNOME
   project.  Whether Linux is suitable for the desktop is no longer the
   question: We are now looking at the next logical step, the mobile
   desktop. And today again GNOME is consolidating the various fruitful
   efforts in this one combined project, the GNOME Mobile & Embedded
   Initiative. kernel concepts very much appreciates and supports this
   effort and is proud to be one of its initial members! As a company
   working in the mobile and embedded Linux field for more than seven years
   and mobile desktops for more than six years this initiative will help us
   to create even better solutions for our customers." -- Nils Faerber, CEO,
   kernel concepts

 * "The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative is a huge step in providing the
   mobile ecosystem with a community-supported, Open Source mobile stack of
   software. This open mobile stack is the perfect complement to an open
   Linux- based mobile platform and complements the work being done in the
   Linux Foundation Mobile Linux workgroup. The GMAE collection of open
   applications will give mobile handset and tablet users a rich and
   consistent 'mobile experience' with standardization opportunities for the
   platform as well as at the user experience level." -- John Cherry, Linux
   Foundation Mobile Linux Manager

 * "The Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS) recognizes the significant
   contributions that GNOME technologies provide for the desktop and
   increasingly for mobile devices. LiPS welcomes the efforts of the GNOME
   Mobile & Embedded Initiative to raise awareness of mobile requirements,
   and to address technological barriers to broader adoption of open source
   in mobile devices. LiPS anticipates productive collaboration with GMAE in
   standardization and in enhancing the mobile user experience." -- Haila
   Wang, president of LiPS Forum

 * "MontaVista Software recognizes the huge opportunity to design, define
   and deliver the key capabilities of future Linux based mobile phone
   products.  We all understand the value of a highly usable, customizable
   and compelling mobile user experience. We anticipate working very closely
   with the GNOME team." -- Larry Slotnick, VP of Engineering, MontaVista
   Software, Inc.

 * "GNOME is an active and truly open developer community creating
   innovative software. This is why Nokia joined the community and chose
   GNOME software as a foundation for the Maemo platform and our Internet
   Tablets. We are excited about the growing use of GNOME software in
   consumer devices. The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative will now take
   this further by bringing together community and industry to promote and
   coordinate the continued development of the GMAE platform." -- Ari
   Jaaksi, Director of Open Source Software Oprations, Nokia

 * "With OpenedHand's core business over the past five years being focused
   on the development and improvement of GNOME based embedded devices, we
   are extremely pleased to be part of the formation of the GNOME Mobile &
   Embedded Initiative. These technologies give device manufacturers
   unrivaled freedom and flexibility in device creation. GMAE further paves
   the way for collaboration between companies and the community to further
   innovations and benefit all involved." -- Matthew Allum, CEO, OpenedHand
   Ltd.

 * "We are thrilled to be a part of this next stage of the Embedded Linux
   market. The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative offers major opportunities
   via increased consolidation of our development platform and by allowing
   coordination around a common schedule, with scope for differentiation
   where it counts. GMAE can do for embedded devices what GNOME has done for
   the desktop." -- Murray Cumming, Managing Director of Openismus GmbH

 * "With its long term focus on simplified, usable human interfaces, the
   entrance of the GNOME project onto the mobile and embedded scene is a
   welcome one. Add in the widespread corporate and community support that
   the parent project enjoys, and the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative is
   a project to follow." -- Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst, RedMonk

 * "As one of the oldest corporate contributors to the GNOME Project, Red
   Hat is excited to see GNOME move into new spaces beyond the desktop.
   We've seen the flexibility of the platform with the new UI we've created
   for the One Laptop per Child project, which is based on the blending of
   technologies that both GNOME and Red Hat bring to the table. GNOME will
   be an incredibly important technology in our drive to build new markets
   in the client space." -- Brian Stevens, CTO at Red Hat

 * "GNOME is a set of versatile components that are very suitable as
   building blocks for creating a software environment for mobile devices
   and phones.  Being such a building block, Tinymail fits in that picture.
   Most of the Tinymail project members are part of the GNOME community,
   they believe the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative will bring component
   teams and companies closer together." -- Philip Van Hoof, author of the
   tinymail framework

 * "As Linux plays a growing role in mobile connected multimedia experiences
   for consumers, the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative comes at an
   important time.  Wind River strongly supports this initiative. GMAE will
   assist the GNOME community to be efficient and help them deliver
   solutions to a much larger audience - the billions of embedded devices
   ranging from cell phones to web tablets to automotive infotainment
   systems. Wind River, the Leader in commercial embedded Linux, looks
   forward to working closely with this community." -- Glenn Seiler,
   Director of Linux Platforms, Wind River