Six Tech Companies Join Up to Boost Linux

There's been a ton of announcements at Computex this week, but the most surprising thing to come out of the entire show is a coalition formed by six of the industry's biggest names.

There are at least a couple of rivalries among ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments. However, this hasn't stopped the six companies from forming a new organization aimed at accelerating the rollout of Linux-based devices.

Dubbed Linaro, the not-for-profit company plans to invest heavily in open source projects, which can then be used by Linux-based distributions such as Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu and webOS.

"Linaro will provide a stable and optimized base for distributions and developers by creating new releases of optimized tools, kernel and middleware software validated for a wide range of SoCs, every six month," the companies said in a press release.

The first software and tools release is due in November of this year, and will provide optimizations for the latest range of ARM Cortex-A CPUs. Though the venture seems to be aimed at smartphones for now, Linaro plans to branch out to other industries in the future.

The organization is made up of the six companies named above, but more are expected to join as Linaro grows.