LiMo Could Join New MeeGo Mobile Group Tweet

The mobile world breathed a quiet sigh of relief Monday when Intel and Nokia merged their mobile Linux-based OS platforms, turning Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo. It's not necessarily because the platform is great - it's because all of these little, fragmented mobile Linux variants can't survive on their own.

At Mobile World Congress today, I asked LiMo executive director Morgan Gillis if he'd be interested in joining forces with MeeGo. LiMo, or Linux Mobile, is a mobile middleware platform run by a broad industry association that's been spinning out a range of phones recently, mostly in Asia.

In many ways, LiMo and MeeGo would be complimentary. MeeGo is an X86-based platform focusing on MIDs and tablets; the only MeeGo phone we've seen so far, the LG GW990, is pretty huge. LiMo is a low-footprint ARM-based platform that scales all the way down to quasi-feature phones. Together, they would have a solution for a full range of mobile devices.

"That could be very logical and beneficial for the market," Gillis said.

But MeeGo's governance model may prevent LiMo from joining up with them, Gillis said. MeeGo is basically shepherded by Intel and Nokia, while LiMo goes for a much more open structure.

"If the governance model is properly open, if the decision making rules are published and if the decision making outcomes are published," LiMo would consider joining forces, Gillis said. The two organizations would also have to resolve their very different tool chains; MeeGo uses Nokia's QT, while LiMo uses GTK.

In any case, platform consolidation is coming to the smartphone market, Gillis said.

"You have to ask, what is the ideal number of platforms? It's certainly no more than five," he said.

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