Santa Rosa, CA — (press release excerpt) — Following months of intense consultations, the Board of Directors of the Embedded Linux Consortium (ELC) voted to adopt an Intellectual Property Agreement (IPA) that lays the groundwork for building a unified embedded Linux platform specification. Details will be available and working groups chartered at the March 12 ELC Business/Technical meeting, being held in conjunction with the Embedded Systems Conference 2002 (ESC2002) in San Francisco.

The ELC Board consists of representatives from leading Linux companies including IBM, LynuxWorks, MontaVista Software, Red Hat, Samsung Electronics, and FSM Labs. IPA ratification and execution ensures that the treatment of intellectual property by contributing ELC members is well understood by all as the organization moves forward to establish an embedded Linux platform specification that fosters interoperability, prevents fragmentation and delivers a more compelling business argument than either proprietary or in-house solutions.

“The IPA is a watershed event,” said ELC Chairman and CEO of LynuxWorks, Dr. Inder Singh. “The ELC can now expand its activities into a crucial new area that the membership has been asking for: defining specifications for an open, multivendor embedded platform for the fragmented embedded market.”

“The IPA has received the blessing of key open source advocates,” said ELC Executive Director Murry Shohat. “This agreement took time to develop because our Board wanted to be fair to all players, from individual developers through large corporations, regardless of their market share or industry clout. The ELC and the embedded Linux industry is poised to move to the next level.”

March 12 ELC Business/Technical Meeting

The March 12 meeting will include a keynote presentation from Rick Lehrbaum of LinuxDevices.com on the state of the embedded Linux market. Attendees will receive a briefing on the IPA and a new business model that enables the ELC to conduct specification development and promotion. The meeting will then shift to a technical focus in which an initial working group of technical experts will help form general and special interest working groups to begin to develop APIs that are key to the unified embedded Linux platform specification. Examples of these APIs include the core platform standard; with future directions for technologies such as real time; security; high availability; Web-enabled wireless devices; GUI /Java; multimedia; and licensing.

Several global opinion leaders have confirmed their attendance and industry luminaries, such as John “Maddog” Hall of Linux International, have been invited.

Interested participants should monitor the ELC website for signup, schedule and contact information.

About the ELC Platform Specification

The ELC Board announced last April its plan to endorse a unified ELC Platform Specification, which will reference other specifications including the Linux Standard Base, POSIX 1003.13, and the Single UNIX Specification. The ELC Platform Specification will initially cover basic OS services that must be supported in any compliant embedded Linux system. The proposed specification will bring together the best of the Linux Standard Base with relevant portions of the POSIX specifications and the Single UNIX Specification as a starting point to scope the functionality of the platform. It will also take into account current Linux practices and APIs to form a robust platform for embedded systems — one that the ELC believes will be supported by all major embedded Linux developers and distributors and sought by embedded Linux consumers.

The ELC has received proposals from three groups should it decide to outsource all or some portion of the standards work: The Open Group (TOG), the Free Standards Group (FSG) and the EEMBC Certification Laboratory (ECL). More information on the ELC Platform Specification is available here.

 
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