Open mobile OS efforts abound

At least three industry consortium are attempting to ease development efforts for mobile application builders with Linux-based, open mobile operating system development initiatives. These efforts carry noble and productive intentions. But if there are multiple ones, leaving one "open" platform to differ from the next, will we be back to where we started?

Three organizations with at least a few overlap members are out to help build an open mobile OS with associated middleware and starter applications that would drive application originality across multiple handset platforms. What’s not clear is how having several such efforts will really help complete the platform-independent goals that would free developers from underlying hardware constraint.