SYSOPENDIGIA releases source code of its 3G Linux smartphone [LWN.net]

SYSOPENDIGIA has announced the release of the source code for its 3G Linux smartphone. "The SYSOPENDIGIA 3G Linux smartphone has been created using Linux operating system and other open-source software components, as well as commercially licensed Qtopia application platform and user interface from Trolltech. "We see that the only way for the mobile industry to answer the rapidly growing need for new functionality and services is increased re-use of existing software asset. Leveraging open-source software is a good way to avoid re-implementing such functionality that is not important for differentiation." says Tuukka Turunen, Director, Special Projects from SYSOPENDIGIA."

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SYSOPENDIGIA releases source code of its 3G Linux smartphone

Posted Feb 8, 2008 5:17 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

The press release says this:

The source code to be contributed contains Linux kernel and device drivers created and modified by SYSOPENDIGIA. The packages can be found from Sourceforge.net under "SYSOPENDIGIA 3G Linux smartphone" project in the "Operating System Kernels" category at the end of February 2008.

...Linux kernel version is 2.6.14 with Monahans/PXA patches from Marvell, and Qtopia platform version is 4.3.

So, an old kernel with a few drivers and patches underneath the qtopia UI. Shame they will be using sourceforge instead of contributing to kernel.org.

We need distributions for the embedded world

Posted Feb 8, 2008 15:00 UTC (Fri) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link]

I believe the embedded platform developers currently are in a stage where the general
PC-platform world was around 1995. At that stage some of the hardware providers started to
understand the benefit of providing drivers for linux, but they had not not quite grasped how
to contribute yet.

In the embedded and linux phone world we're now seing the same thing. The hardware developers
have been consumers of open source for quite some time, and are now starting to grasp the
benefits of being a open source provider too. Unfortunately the stumble a bit on how and where
to contribute.

What I'm hoping we'll see is one or several distributions (maybe like maemo or openmoko) that
specifically target the embedded world. Such targeted distributions could act as a natural
point for contributions from embedded hardware vendors.

Unfortunately, what we've got so far are each hardware vendor creating a dist for his specific
hardware, and not being too cooperative with others, I'm having a hard time seeing that
cathedral like approach succeeding in the long run, regardless if it is open source or not.

SYSOPENDIGIA releases source code of its 3G Linux smartphone

Posted Feb 8, 2008 20:08 UTC (Fri) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

This looks like a sane product, actually.  Pity that it might just be the single worst company
name I've ever had the displeasure of reading.