MontaVista has agreed to provide Linux “platforms” to NEC for its hardware reference designs for mobile phones, digital consumer devices, and car navigation systems. NEC, meanwhile, will join MontaVista's hardware vendor self-certification program, and will resell and support MontaVista Linux.

According to the terms of the partnership, NEC will join the LSP Certification Program that MontaVista launched in March. The program provides hardware vendors with a Board Support Toolkit (BST) that enables them to self-certify their products and produce LSPs (Linux support packages) that qualify for standard MontaVista support rates. Membership in the program will enable NEC to resell MontaVista Linux, and the company will also provide support and engineering services to customers using MontaVista.

Additionally, MontaVista and NEC have made a “long-term collaboration” deal under which MontaVista will optimize its commercial Linux distributions for various NEC hardware reference designs.

According to MontaVista, the two companies are also discussing a joint development effort to produce an IDE (integrated development environment) for multi-core processors, such as the MPCore processor co-developed by NEC and ARM and announced in May.

NEC's GM of software strategy planning, Seiji Mitsuoka, said, “This partnership represents our mutual commitment to encourage the development of new, sophisticated, embedded applications.”

MontaVista's senior VP of strategic operations Kelly Herrell said, “Through our collaboration with NEC Electronics, device and system manufacturers will benefit from a Linux implementation supported by both MontaVista Software and NEC Electronics.”

 
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.