Santa Rosa, CA — (press release excerpt) — Meeting nine times since kickoff in March, the Embedded Linux Consortium's Core Platform Working Group has achieved consensus on a strawman specification. The document will soon circulate for comment among member companies under the organization's intellectual property rules. This cycle will enable the group to build a completed core platform specification for the global embedded Linux community by year's end. A difficult but worthy goal, the Core Platform is expected to bring order to the market by reducing concerns and silencing competitive disinformation about operating system fragmentation and support.

“Working group members believe the strawman document we've developed is in excellent shape. In cooperation with the ELC Board of Directors, we are now establishing procedures to permit broader circulation,” said Mark Brown, chairman of the working group and Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM. “We think the resulting specification will meet the needs of the embedded Linux community and also be aligned with other Linux standardization efforts such as the Linux Standards Base (LSB). We should be able to offer an ELC Platform Specification, V1.0, to the Board sometime before Christmas.”

The international group is employing an API-centric approach to standardization of a Linux computing platform specifically for embedded applications. The core platform will initially cover basic OS services that must be supported in any compliant embedded Linux system. The group consists of technologists from companies who are members of the ELC. WG members are Mark Brown, IBM; Mitch Bunnell, LynuxWorks, Kevin Dankwardt, K-Computing; Joe DeBlaquiere, Red Hat Software; Thiru Govindan, WiPRO; Bao Ha, Independent; Lee Courtney, MontaVista Software; Dong-Jun Shin, Samsung Electronics; Victor Yodaiken, FSM Labs and I.P. Park, Panasonic Technologies. Several other members have expressed their desire to participate, and plan to join the Working Group in the near future .

Echoing the theme of “historic significance” first offered by ELC founder Rick Lehrbaum (LinuxDevices.com), ELC Chairman Dr. Inder Singh (CEO of LynuxWorks), said, “in spite of many failed attempts over its history, the embedded community has never achieved a single unified platform. The ELC's progress to date adds confidence that we'll succeed with a unified platform that is totally open. In addition, it will be a multi-vendor industry standard, mirroring the legacy of efforts like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for the Internet — rather than through the emergence of a single dominant, proprietary, monopolistic platform.

“From a design and development standpoint,” added Dan Bandera, ELC Vice Chair (Market Development Manager, IBM Pervasive Computing), “the ELC's core platform specification will give middleware vendors a rock-solid environment that conserves support costs by eliminating framentation and reducing the variants in the marketplace With strong middleware support, embedded Linux should rapidly increase its market participation.”

Any member of the Embedded Linux Consortium that signs an Intellectual Property Agreement may be included in the review group now being established. The consortium is also studying ways to expand the pre-review pool to include key voices from the open source and academic communities, and interested standards bodies outside of ELC membership. “We want to employ the best possible standardization practices consistent with GNU/Linux,” said Jim Ready, ELC Treasurer and CEO of MontaVista Software.

 
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