When Motorola announced early in June of its intentions to create the world’s first globally adopted open mobile Linux platform, few critics would have been surprised by its next move. Motorola has now joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Provider Member and has proposed an Eclipse Tools for mobile Linux (TmL) project. This project will provide extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for the development of C++ applications targeting mobile devices.

A few weeks ago, Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone announced their intent to establish a world-class Linux-based platform to provide key benefits for the mobile industry. These include lower development costs, increased flexibility, and a richer mobile ecosystem. The group even contemplated forming an independent organization.

The community got a taste of the company’s open source moves as early as the JavaOne Conference last month. Motorola used the conference to unveil open source initiatives in mobile development, more specifically, its Java test frameworks and sample test cases. John Jackson, a senior analyst at the Yankee Group predicted that Motorola was trying to take some leadership and throw down the gauntlet for other industry participants.

In addition, Motorola recently launched MOTODEV, Motorola's new global developer and ISV program, as well as open source.motorola.com. open source.motorola.com is a new resource aimed at sharing source code, original Motorola open source projects and new ideas and information with developers around the world. The site features source code, including kernel and drivers, for Motorola’s Linux-based devices.

In the new project, Motorola will contribute software, engineering resources, and its mobile expertise to work with the Eclipse community and across the mobile industry, to develop a comprehensive development environment for mobile Linux platforms. Developers working within the Eclipse community will be encouraged to contribute expertise and know-how to help reduce testing times and increase market-ready mobile application development. The primary focus of the Eclipse TmL project will be to provide the extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for the development of C++ applications targeting mobile devices. Included within this goal is the need to provide an optimized development environment for the creation and testing of end-to-end services which requires the integration of server side development with the device-side emulation environment. A secondary goal will include providing a complete environment for the development and building of the entire target device software stack (OS, drivers, middleware, and applications).

This is a big leap for device software development. Goeff Koch at Intel feels that the problem at present is the communications landscape remains pockmarked with proprietary legacy technologies. “Companies might look longingly toward Linux for their new applications, but the fact that the old applications would have to be ported first gives even stalwart tech managers pause,” he says. This is, no doubt, changing, as virtualization is tipping the low- and mid-range handsets towards Linux. “Motorola is especially strong at this,” he said. “Anywhere between 8 to 10 million phones have been shipped with Linux in Asia.”

The TmL project is not the first to target Linux specifically. Before TmL, the Linux Distro project, which made a case for an Eclipse on Linux Working Group within the Eclipse Foundation to address issues about adopting Eclipse on Linux, making Eclipse use on Linux more powerful and more widespread.

TmL will be part of the Device Software Development Platform (DSDP), an open source collaborative software development project dedicated to providing an extensible, standards-based platform to address a broad range of needs in the device software development space using the Eclipse platform. The DSDP also comprises Nokia’s Mobile Tools for Java Platform and Fujitsu’s Native Application Builder.

Ed Burnette over at zdnet, however, is unclear about where the code for TmL will come from. “Some projects start from scratch, such as BIRT, and some start with a donation of an existing product or code base, like WTP. The TmL project proposal simple states that they will conduct a review of all potential contributions, as several organizations have developed capabilities similar to what Eclipse TmL proposes. Those contributions which best align with the goals of the project will be refactored and used as the starting point for TmL,” he says.

The TmL project is still in its proposal phase and is awaiting approval from the Eclipse Foundation.