The Linux Foundation has announced keynote speakers for the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) 2011, running April 11-13 in San Francisco, and the co-located Android Builders Summit on April 13-14. The Android Builders Summit features a keynote from Motorola's Christy Wyatt, who will no doubt be grilled about the rumor that Motorola is building its own mobile operating system.

With the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) now embedded in the Linux Foundation (LF), the non-profit Linux advocacy organization has ganged together the April 11-13 show with its invitation-only Linux Collaboration Summit , scheduled for April 6-8. Directly after ELC, meanwhile, will come the new Android Builders Summit also hosted by the LF, set for April 13-14.

In short, the LF has spun a full week of Linux-related hob-nobbing with a weekend for partying or high-level negotiations in between. The Collaboration Summit will kick off this year's Linux 20th anniversary celebrations, leading up to an official celebration in August.

ELC: Yocto, Linaro, MeeGo, and more

This year's ELC includes a keynote by Dirk Hohndel, Intel's chief Linux and open source technologist, speaking on April 11 on the topic of the Yocto Project. Here he will likely offer more details on the recently announced "alignment" of the new LF-hosted project with the OpenEmbedded project, the topic of a separate session listed below.

On April 12, IBM Linux kernel developer Arnd Bergmann will address the issue of "Becoming part of the Linux kernel community," a talk that is said to include discussion of Android and MeeGo. Here, Bergmann may well discuss the touchy issues surrounding Google's lack of Android contributions to the Linux kernel.

ELC will also feature over 50 Bird-of-a-Feather sessions and dozens of technical sessions, including, surprisingly, two MeeGo sessions from Nokia, which appears to be backing away from MeeGo. The full list is available via a link at the end of the story, but here's a sampling of some of the more interesting topics and/or speakers:

• Linaro: A year of change - David Rusling (Linaro)
• High-Performance Computing using GPUs — Mike Anderson (The PTR Group)
• Integrating OpenEmbedded and Yocto — speaker TBA
• Kernel Shark tutorial — Steven Rostedt (Red Hat)
• Working with HardIRQs: Life beyond static IRQ assignments — Paul Mundt (Renesas)
• Crowd sourcing and protecting the open source community — Keith Bergelt (OIN)
• How to power tune a device running on a Linux kernel for better suspend battery life — Mark Gross (Intel)
• MeeGo BoFs: New Linux platform for mobile computing devices — Alison Chaiken (Nokia)
• Android for servers? — John Stultz (IBM)
• Hot multi-OS switch: How to run Ubuntu, ChromiumOS, Android at the same time on an embedded device — Grégoire Gentil (Always Innovating)

Android Builders Summit

ELC attendees will get discounts on registering for the Android Builders Summit which immediately follows it. The Android event will feature a key note from Motorola VP Christy Wyatt (pictured) on an unknown topic. There will also be an address by Mark Charlebois, director of Open Source Strategy at the mobile open source Qualcomm subsidiary Qualcomm Innovation Center, speaking on the past and future evolution of Android.

Android Builders Summit panel sessions include presentations on the AllJoyn peer-to-peer technology, Android internals, smartphone audio, the LF's Yocto Project, and tracing and profiling for power management.

In addition, there are a number of sessions linked to Texas Instruments (TI) that seem to be equally applicable to Android and Linux, including one on interfacing a OMAP3 system-on-chip (SoC) with an FPGA, another on the TI AM1808 SoC, and a presentation on HDMI displays using an OMAP4-based PandaBoard (pictured at left). Android training courses are also said to be part of the two-day summit.

Will Android and Linux patch it up?

The Android Builders Summit comes at an interesting time in the intersection between Android and Linux. (What's a kernel between friends?) Already, the inaugural event was bound to feature some drama, what with the ongoing rift between Google and the Linux kernel community over technical differences and Google's lack of upstream Android contributions to the kernel.

Over the last week, this rift appeared to be heightened when legal scholars published claims that Google had violated GPL licensing related to its use of Linux header files in Android. Since then a number of Linux insiders, including hacker-in-chief Linus Torvalds, have disputed these claims.

If the Android licensing issue is indeed a tempest in a teapot, Android and Linux developers may well be able to start patching up their patching differences and reunite in their common defense against the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, and Apple, all of whom are bombarding Android over patent legality. This week, Microsoft, which has repeatedly hammered embedded Linux targets over patent claims in recent years, announced a lawsuit against Barnes & Noble over the use of Android in the Nook e-reader.

Is Motorola prepping its own OS?

Another bit of gossip may also be bandied about at the Android Builders Summit, especially with Motorola's Wyatt announced as the keynote speaker. She might be asked, for example, whether this week's rumor published in InformationWeek is true about Motorola building its own web-based mobile operating system.

As evidence, the story reported a strong confirmation from Jonathan Goldberg, an analyst with Deutsche Bank. It also quotes an unnamed source who says the company has been hiring a number of ex-Apple and ex-Adobe developers to work on a web-based OS.

Motorola did not deny the rumor, but also stated that "Motorola Mobility is committed to Android as an operating system," says the story.

The rumors first emerged last May when it was reported that the company was about to acquire Azingo to help it build a new OS. Motorola never announced the acquisition, but the Azingo site continues to be frozen in time, with the last press releases dated 2009.

Azingo developed LiMo (Linux Mobile) middleware and Linux-ready Web 2.0 app software. Considering the that alleged connection, and Motorola's Linux-oriented past and Android present, any new Motorola OS would very likely be based on Linux. Google certainly went in that direction with its web-oriented Chrome OS.

Availability

The full schedule for ELC and the Android Builders Summit, which collectively run April 11-14, may be found here. Registration information may be found here.

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This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.