There is no real surprise to see Linux being adopted like the bargin of the century by the mobile phone industry.
The possibility to standardise on an essentially royalty-free, open source operating system for the next generation of PC-like mobile phones is too good to ignore.
But once again the naturally commercially aggressive chip companies have taken a simple concept and made it too complicated for its own good.
Everyone knows that for an OS to succeed it must become a standard across the industry but when it comes to defining the details of that standard the chip firms inevitably disagree and splinter.
Ten years ago this splintering befuddled and slowed the introduction of wireless LAN technology. What are the odds on something similar happening with Mobile Linux?
There are already two competing Mobile Linux groups - the LiMo Foundation and the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum - and now ARM has drawn companies from both camps to go off at a tangent to develop their own Linux-based open source platform for next-generation mobile applications.
The collaboration, announced at this month's ARM Developers’ Conference in California, is clearly ARM-centric, and why not? Does anyone really know how many mobile phones contain ARM processors?
But will it have enough clout to drive the market quickly to standardisation or will it just add a new level of confusion?
The plan is to develop an open source platform based on Linux, Gnome Mobile and Mozilla Firefox running on silicon from Texas Instruments, Marvell and Samsung. Remember, Marvell was the company which bought Intel's wireless comms IC business, so this is a pretty powerful group of silicon suppliers.
But where does this put the Mobile Linux clubs, like LiMo and LiPS?
LiMo looked pretty powerful itself when set up in January by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics and Vodafone to create a de facto standard Linux Platform.
ARM itself is an associate member of LiMo, well it was, but maybe not now, and perhaps it will take fellow partner MontaVista with it.
Let's not forget the other big-hitters associated with LiMo, these include Broadcom, Ericsson and NXP.
But the LiMo Foundation is not the only show in town. The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum has recently released its own set of specifications as Release 1.0, with an accompanying roadmap highlighting specific goals for implementation throughout 2008.
LiPS Forum members include other Linux contenders such as Trolltech, a la Mobile and VirtualLogix, in addition to Orange, Telecom Italia, Huawei, Freescale, TI and ZTE.
So what does all of this mean for the future of Mobile Linux?
In a recently published report, “The Impact of Cellular Linux”, IMS Research Analyst Alison Bogle said: “The Mobile Linux community will eventually standardise on one or two leading unified Linux-based platforms, which will become the de facto standards.”
Is two the maximum we can hope for? Not if the chip firms insist on reverting to type with their egotistic posturing. Just count up the number of short-range wireless 'standards' there are in the world right now.
Perhaps hedging your bets is the best option? NXP, MontaVista and others are maintaining a membership in more than one group. But that is costly and probably not sustainable in the long run.
Experience teaches us that for the market to be truly lucrative to suppliers, there must be one dominant standard i.e. x86 and Windows. It hasn't happened yet in the wireless LAN market, WiMAX seems likely to throw a spanner in the works for 3G, and now a Mobile Linux standards stand-off could confuse things further.
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