Today MontaVista announced that they’ll be powering the new Motorola A760:
CTIA Wireless, New Orleans, March 19, 2003 — MontaVista Software, Inc., the company powering the embedded revolution, today announced that MontaVista™ Linux® is the chosen operating system for the recently announced Motorola A760 mobile phone, the world’s first handset based on Linux and Java technology.
Yeah, I know. It’s just a press release. It’s a big thing though. Montavista is one of the biggest embedded Linux companies out there. They’ve got the ‘free-as-in-speech but not free-as-in-beer’ thing working for them.
If Montavista is going to be providing the power for the new Motorola phones, it will probably give the Symbian phones some good competition, and competition is good. I also like Montavista because while their toolchain and distro isn’t free, they do give away tons of programmer hours back to the community in the form of patches to the Linux kernel and other stuff.
I saw a presentation by someone at Montavista who claimed that they had many of their people working on the Linux kernel in order to bring the kernel up to their specs. Of course they’re also contributing the core kernel code back to the community. At least last summer, they also had several subsystem maintainers on payroll.
Like I said, this should be a good thing for the mobile phone market.