LinuxDevices recently caught up with OSDL spokesperson Bill Weinberg to discuss the organizations new MLI (Mobile Linux Initiative). Weinberg, who serves as the OSDLs representative to the MLI, filled us in on the initiatives early progress, strategy, and tactics for the year ahead.
Can you bring us up to speed on what the MLI (Mobile Linux Initiative) has been up to recently?
Sure. For starters, weve recently gained a couple of new members, who joined the OSDL with the particular focus of being involved in the Mobile Linux Initiative. These initially included Motorola and PalmSource, and weve since added Mizi. Also, Siemens just joined, explicitly in order to join the Carrier Grade Linux and MLI working groups.
We just had a meeting in Tokyo—we had decided as a body to meet in Tokyo after our launch meeting in Beijing, for a couple of reasons. We wanted to engage with new members and non-members, to gather requirements, and do some additional recruiting, with special emphasis on the ecosystem around DoCoMo.
So, in addition to the membership attending, we had observer members from two categories. We had observers who were members of OSDL, but not participants yet in MLI, and then we had some outside participants, who were there as observers. We structured the meeting in such a way that we had a day and a half that was open to the outside, and then a day of exclusively membership meeting.
We had I believe 25 attendees from a variety of companies, and within the membership of the OSDL, there were people there from NEC and NTT as observers, as well as people like MontaVista, PalmSource, and Intel. That proved to be very fertile, very good discussion. We accomplished a couple of different things.