NTT DoCoMo, the driving force behind the partnership, and other carriers are pursuing a dual-sourcing strategy, as they don't want to depend on one operating system, and customers like choice. Symbian is the other operating system they've settled on.
Since some members are competitors, however, the consortium faces challenges around governance and sharing of intellectual property. In order for the initiative to succeed, the companies will have to develop APIs that support applications across devices. NTT DoCoMo and the handset makers plan to form an independent foundation to jointly develop APIs, architecture specs, reference source code, and tools.
One of the goals of the LiPS Forum is to develop standard APIs for services such as messaging, presence, and voice calling, as well as APIs for application and device management. LiPS plans to publish the service layer APIs this year. Access, meanwhile, plans to open source its application framework
for the Access Linux Platform, and it's working with LiPS Forum and the Open Source Development Labs to determine how they may adopt the framework.
What all this means is that the existing Linux and Palm smartphone camps may begin to gravitate toward two emerging Linux options. But even that may be too many. After all, there's only one BlackBerry OS, one Symbian, one Mac OS X, one Windows Mobile.
Linux's challenge: reducing the fragmentation.
