Linux Consumer-Electronics Group Formed

The companies revealed the creation of the CE Linux Forum (CELF), aimed at establishing extensions for the open-source operating system to make it a more effective platform for consumer devices.

CELF's founding members are Hitachi, Matsushita, NEC, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, and Toshiba. According to the announcement, IBM is seeking membership.

Already in place is the forum's first working group, assigned to solicit requirements from member companies.

By fall, a forum spokesperson says, other working groups will be in place, seeking to develop specifications ranging from further lists of requirements to full-blown application programming interfaces.

Early technical goals include improvement in startup/shutdown time, better real-time functionality, reduction in RAM/ROM size requirements, and more efficient power management.

"We're trying to hit the ground running and do so with a coordination of activities, letting us avoid duplication of effort," says Tim Bird, Sony's senior engineer and co-chair of CELF's architecture group.

As specifications are developed, they'll be posted on CELF's public Web site's CE Linux source tree, openly available for download per Linux's General Public License tradition.

The public source tree is at the heart of CELF's pursuit of the widest possible adoption of forum-approved extensions and is expected to come online quickly.

"We're planning on making the tree available on the Web site by the end of summer," Bird says. "How soon after that its extensions start showing up in products depends on where members and nonmembers are in their development process."

The forum itself won't develop code.

"CELF will solicit implementations from members," Bird says. "Obviously, since it's open source, nonmembers can submit implementations."

Those implementations will be evaluated from a variety of angles within the forum, with dedicated working groups examining, and signing off on, various aspects, including technical specs and intellectual-property issues such as review for potential patent infringements.

Evaluation/approval turnaround time remains to be determined, but Bird expects at least a 30-day period for open review by CELF members.

Creation of the industry forum flowed from December's announcement of ongoing collaboration between Sony and Matsushita to develop Linux enhancements and extensions designed for digital consumer electronics products.

The creation of CELF and its rapid move to open posting of extensions may be well-timed, Forrester Research analyst Ted Schandler says.

"Linux is already present in many enterprise servers and appliances and is starting to show up as an embedded operating system in devices,TiVo and Motorola cell phones, for example," Schandler says.

He says he wouldn't be surprised to see further consumer electronics growth. "Linux is free, robust, small, and easily extended to handle device-specific tasks. Of course, consumers will never know or care that their set-top box, DVD jukebox, or kitchen control center is running Linux."

Whether or not that particular Linux comes with CELF's imprimatur or is pulled from the wider-open Linux world may start being answered on electronics retailers' shelves over the next year.

*This story courtesy of InformationWeek.