DoCoMo Takes Stake in Linux Developer
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NTT DoCoMo, the Japanese telecom service provider, has invested $3 million in MontaVista Software, a developer of Linux-based mobile middleware.
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Plans call for a Linux-based platform that will be usable in multiple environments, including on PCs, servers and PDAs.
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Another mobile Linux platform, this time from Azingo, hit the market on Wednesday, joining an increasingly crowded market of Linux phone software.Formerly called Celunite, Azingo aims to differentiate itself from the crowd by offering phone makers an entire package, including kernel, middleware, applications, development tools, and integration services.&quot;Mobile Linux has failed because there&#39;s a big integration problem,&quot; said Michael Mclaughlin, marketing director at Azingo. &quot;People come with piece parts.&quot;For example, companies such as&#160;MontaVista&#160;and Wind River make mobile Linux kernels, while others&#160;such as&#160;Trolltech, purchased by Nokia&#160;just this week, make application development environments. Phone makers typically must buy the different components, then struggle to integrate them. That puts mobile Linux at a disadvantage against some other mobile platforms,&#160;such as&#160;Windows Mobile, which comes complete, he said.Azingo is offering a complete suite of mobile Linux software but will also help customers integrate different pieces if they choose components from different vendors, said Mclaughlin.The applications Azingo offers as part of the platform include Web widgets that can deliver information such as weather and traffic, entertainment applications such as video and audio players, and productivity software&#160;such as&#160;e-mail.Azingo hasn&#39;t announced any deals with handset makers planning to use its software. Mclaughlin said the company has been working with some of the well-known vendors and expects handsets running its software to ship in the fourth quarter.The company isn&#39;t the only one offering the market a complete suite of mobile Linux software.&#160;A La Mobile has a similar approach, using some of its own software and integrating components from other vendors, including Trolltech. GUPP Technologies, a Malaysian company, announced in 2006 that it would use A La Mobile&#39;s platform.Azingo will also compete against&#160;Android, Google&#39;s high-profile Linux-based mobile phone operating platform, which includes an operating system, middleware, and applications. Android phones are expected to become available in the second half of this year.Azingo is a member of the&#160;LiMo Foundation, a group founded by Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Vodafone, Samsung, and others to build a mobile Linux platform.
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Japanâs dominant wireless operator, NTT DoCoMo Inc., has reached a basic agreement to offer its popular i-mode mobile Internet technology to Britainâs mmO2 Plc.
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CALIFORNIA&#39;S MONTAVISTA HAS landed the deal to supply its Linux OS to two major Japanese handset providers, NEC and Panasonic.
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A Linux developer has come up with a virtualized I/O system that allows competing virtualization software to use one mechanism for handling storage and other virtual devices.
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&quot;Future Palm devices may run Linux, thanks to a surprise purchase by PalmSource. The company, which makes the operating software for the PalmOne devices (notably the Treo smartphones), intends to buy China
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First hardware maker to align with community-based Linux offering.
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Open-source champion Red Hat has taken its new CFO from the traditional business world. Charles Peters, who becomes executive vice president and CFO of the Linux-based firm, has a solid background as a qualified
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New CEO brings passion and an eclectic background as he charts a new course for the Linux developer.
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With Sun Microsystems' $1 billion acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL announced Wednesday, Sun gets ownership of a major player in the open source software industry while MySQL gets the backing of a multibillion-dollar, established systems company.Called the largest open source software deal ever, the merger makes Sun the owner of a critical part of the popular LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python/PHP) open source software stack. Sun already has been offering up its own software to open source, even basing its development tools strategy on the open source NetBeans platform."MySQL is an important part of the LAMP stack, [and] has grown to be enterprise-ready technology used by large organizations, and Sun is now a major player in the LAMP stack," said Raven Zachary, analyst with The 451 Group. MySQL customers get the benefit of a larger support organization, Zachary said.Sun, meanwhile, will push MySQL as enterprise-ready technology and as an alternative to proprietary databases like Oracle, he said. "I think Sun has really been struggling in building a software revenue stream around its open source projects, and I think for them to take on MySQL, now they have a very successful revenue stream around an open source software [stack] that was lacking before," said Zachary.The deal was applauded by open source CRM vendor SugarCRM, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) tools vendor Zend Technologies, and SpringSource, makers of the open source Spring Framework for Java development."I think it's an incredibly smart move by Sun and Jonathan Schwartz," said SugarCRM CEO John Roberts. While Roberts said he had been looking forward to an IPO by MySQL, the deal nonetheless makes sense. Sun, Roberts said, gets a mission-critical database that is "probably the most widely used database on the planet today."Zend and SpringSource had similar impressions."I think open source has gone mainstream," and Sun has put its stamp on it, said Zend CEO Harold Goldberg. "We think it's a great day for open source, and we think it's a great day for the LAMP stack.""The acquisition of MySQL by Sun marks one of the most significant recognitions of the importance and power of open source as a disruptive force in technology," said SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson in his blog.Sun heralded the deal as its entrance into the database market and will offer global support offerings for MySQL. "We're announcing we're entering the $15 billion database business," said Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on a conference call with MySQL and Sun executives.By Sun's acquisition, MySQL overcomes its biggest impediment: Ensuring peace of mind to a global company that wants to put MySQL into a mission-critical deployment, Schwartz said. "It?s very clear to us that that is what our customers have come to expect from Sun," he said. "We believe there are synergies in putting the two companies together that will allow MySQL to grow more rapidly and allow Sun to grow more rapidly."New customers for both MySQL and Sun MySQL has been extending into mission-critical, high performance environments in the last couple of years, said Marten Mickos, who has been MySQL CEO and will become a senior vice president at Sun. "With this acquisition by Sun, we'll be able to offer those customers even better service, a full stack and at the same time heterogeneous solutions running on a number of platforms with a number of environments," Mickos said. "It strengthens our ability to serve our existing customers and very importantly serve the new customers coming over as enterprises move over to Web-based architectures in their enterprise infrastructure."The acquisition complements Sun technology, said Ian Murdock, chief OS strategist at Sun in a separate interview. "If you think about the two companies together in terms of technology offerings and technology basis, it's very complementary," he said. Sun is in the enterprise and has a substantial Web presence, while MySQL has a substantial Web presence and is entering the enterprise, Murdock said.The MySQL database runs on several platforms, including Linux and Sun's Solaris. MySQL does not see the database market, though, as saturated. "One of the things that's always been exciting about MySQL is we're really going after a new market of database users," with success in the Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and SaaS (software as a service) spaces, said Zack Urlocker, MySQL executive vice president of products. Sun and MySQL also have joint customers such as eBay, he said."I think putting the two companies together, both in terms of what Sun can do to accelerate MySQL adoption and what MySQL can do to accelerate Sun's position in the Web space is going to be very interesting to watch," Murdock said. "This allows us to reach into new markets and have conversations with enormous numbers of developers and startups and other companies that are using MySQL in droves," he said, also pointing out that Sun could sell its workstations and servers to these users.Although Sun has been involved in the development of the rival open source database, PostgreSQL, Schwartz said Sun was reaffirming its commitment to PostgreSQL. "We are firmly committed to figuring out the ways we can optimize and integrate innovations across the two communities. Between MySQL and PostgreSQL, we probably have a large portion of the market covered," said Schwartz.Sun's Josh Berkus is the lead on the PostgreSQL project. Berkus said Sun would continue to accommodate multiple databases.The idea of Sun buying MySQL was born out of a dinner between Schwartz and Mickos a few months ago, Urlocker said. Although MySQL had been on a track to deliver an IPO, the chance to become part of Sun "became just too exciting for us," he said. "This enables us to accelerate our growth onto a much larger kind of platform in the industry."MySQL will become part of Sun as part of the deal, which is expected to be completed in about two months. MySQL products likely will continue to be offered via the same open source subscription strategy.
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Japanese mobile phone company DoCoMo is in talks to buy 3G handsets from Motorola, the world's second largest handset maker.
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TOKYO (XFN-ASIA) - NTT DoCoMo Inc, Japan&#39;s leading mobile phone service operator, said it will invest a total of 8.2 mln usd in two China-based companies in a move to strengthen its mobile phone businesses in the rapidly growing market there.
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Lehman Brothers, Canaccord Adams and others invest new money in Linux-based supercomputer maker
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PalmSource has bought mobile phone software developer China MobileSoft with a view to developing a version of Palm OS Cobalt that will run on Linux in mobile devices.
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A number of the larger Linux developers like Red Hat and Novell are likely to back the plan, bolstering its uptake in the market. The agreement aims to ensure compatibility between Linux versions
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Mobile rivals compete for Texas Mobile World Congress The jockeying for dominance in mobile Linux developer platforms has taken a fresh twist with key announcements from two leading players arm wrestling for advantage.â¦