China Mobile – world's largest mobile carrier – joins Linux Foundation – Huge Boost for MeeGo Project

China Mobile is the largest mobile carrier in the world in terms of subscribers and based on market value. It is now one of 10 Gold Members and the first Chinese enterprise to join the Linux Foundation

“China Mobile’s decision to join The Linux Foundation and their commitment to Linux could represent a seismic step toward a realignment of OSes in China and in the telecommunications industry,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “For The Linux Foundation, the opportunity to present Linux as a choice to 560 million users is a power-packed proposition.”

Bill Huang, General Manager of China Mobile Research Institute, stated: “China Mobile recognizes The Linux Foundation as the world’s foremost nonprofit Linux organization, the focal point for Linux technology, standardization and innovation. We see enormous value in the open architecture of the Linux system and look forward to contributing to Linux on a global scale.”

LinuxFoundation.org

In terms of MeeGo – there’s now over half a billion subscriber data when designing your Mobile OS. China Mobile has already dipped into the Linux MobileOS world with their OPhone OS – based on Google Android and currently has about 50,000 developers, 20,000 apps and 25 million downloads as of June 2010. (Really, Million or Billion? 2.7m is what Ovi Store does in a day – 81M/Month). China Mobile has already teamed up with Nokia before on App development with the Mobile Market (MM) Ovi Development Partner Programme aimed to be a one stop service for developers. So a push and contribution towards MeeGo development isn’t too hard to imagine.

In terms of other support in China, we’ve already seen China based Red Flag produce one of the first MeeGo tablets – the NPad (not to be confused with another windows 7 nPad)

Linux Foundation / WSJ / ReadWriteWeb

Tags: China Mobile, Linux Foundation, MeeGo

Category: MeeGo, Nokia