Linux Foundation and Consumer Electronics Linux Forum to Merge
CE Linux Forum to become a workgroup at The Linux Foundation, expanding technical work on Embedded Linux at the Foundation
SAN FRANCISCO, October 27, 2010 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, and the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF), a nonprofit organization and international open source software development community focused on embedded Linux, today announced they will merge organizations, resulting in the CE Linux Forum becoming a technical workgroup at The Linux Foundation. As part of this merge, The Linux Foundation will expand its technical programs in the embedded computing space.
The use of Linux in embedded products has skyrocketed in recent years, with Linux now being used in consumer electronic devices of all kinds. CELF and The Linux Foundation believe that by combining resources they can more efficiently enable the adoption of Linux in the Consumer Electronics (CE) industry. Given the broad overlap in members between The Linux Foundation and CELF, the similarity in the goals of both organizations, and the large increase of embedded participants coming to Linux in recent years, this aligning of resources will strengthen each organization and ultimately help the organizations’ members achieve their missions: growing the embedded Linux market.
“CELF has done a good job of stewarding the consumer electronics industry through this period of rapid adoption of Linux,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “By combining their technical work with our broader reach and existing staff and programs, we should be able to foster tighter collaboration between industry and the Linux developer community as well as take Linux to even more devices and more use.”
“CELF and The Linux Foundation have co-located technical events in the spring over the last couple of years to exchange technical information. We have noticed an increasing number of technical areas that both organizations are interested in,” said Nobuhiro Asai, chair of board of directors of the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum. “This merger is a natural transition to accelerate the use of
Linux in consumer electronics and strengthen the involvement of CE-related companies within the Linux developer community.”
Details of Merger
CELF will become an official workgroup of The Linux Foundation. Members of CELF who are not already Linux Foundation members can be grandfathered into the organization at the Silver membership level. Organized to promote the use of Linux in digital CE products, CELF was established in 2003 by eight major consumer electronics companies: Panasonic Corporation (Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.), Sony Corporation, Hitachi, Ltd., NEC Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Sharp Corporation, and TOSHIBA CORPORATION.
The Linux Foundation will take over the management of CELF’s technical events and web infrastructure.
New Embedded Workgroup: the Yocto Project™
The Linux Foundation is also announcing it is expanding its technical work in the embedded space with the continuation of existing CELF work as well as the formation of another new workgroup focused on the embedded space, the Yocto Project.
The Yocto Project will provide open source, high quality tools to help companies make custom Linux-based systems for embedded products, regardless of hardware architecture. The open source Yocto Project brings together the elements needed to make the normally difficult embedded Linux development process easier. The Yocto Project is launching its version 0.9 with initial versions of common build tools. Participation in the workgroup is completely open – anyone can join the development effort. The Linux Foundation invites contributors and encourages developers and others to participate at the project website (www.yoctoproject.org).
About The CE Linux Forum
The CE Linux Forum is a nonprofit consortium established in 2003, which is dedicated to the development and enhancement of Linux-based embedded devices. Through shared knowledge and collaboration, this international group of engineers brings their ideas and best efforts to missions such as decreasing system size, startup/shutdown time, power consumption, improving support for various CPU architectures, developing middleware and more.
About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by hosting important workgroups, events such as LinuxCon, and online resources such as Linux.com. For more information, please visit www.linuxfoundation.org or follow the organization on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/linuxfoundation.
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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
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