Linux Solutions

Symbian’s VP, the guy whose company who was recently absorbed by Nokia, has told a conference of industry insiders in San Francisco, that Linux is not fit for use in mobile phones.

This morning at the GigaOM:Mobilize conference Jerry Panagrossi, vice president of Symbian’s North American operations said that, “There’s been a lot of misleading information over the years…about the fitness of Linux for the mobile space,

“There has been wonderful work, fantastic work in the Linux community in the workstation and PC space, but when you drag that over into the mobile space, there is an entirely different domain with a different set of challenges that handset managers must overcome.

“This is particularly true with the resource constraints that we deal with on mobile devices - constraints in computation capability, resource and memory management, and power management. When you drill down and look at Linux…you realize it’s just a kernel.”

Panagrossi believes that in adopting Linux, mobile phone makers are pushing the industry in the wrong direction. He argues that they are creating more fragmentation, not less.

When you build a Linux phone, he says, manufacturers can’t help but move beyond the core OS.

“You quickly gravitate towards a proprietary implementation, as you add an underlying device driver model [and] you add an application execution environment.

“When you ask the Linux solution providers what percentage of software runs across all of their platforms, the answer is near zero per cent. There’s such a degree of high fragmentation in that space, and I think it’s high time we set the record straight.”

Unsurprisingly Panagrossi’s speech didn’t go down well with Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMO Foundation.

“On the question of whether Linux is suitable for mobile phones: I think that is a question that was answered four or five years ago,” Gillis said, who was sitting just to Panagrossi’s left. “We’ve introduced 23 LiMO mobile phones since we launched last year…all of the issues have been answered now.

“The real question is about access to developers. Linux is a very prevalent technology. There are something like 5 million active developers, and the other technologies rely on communities that are much, much smaller. And in Symbian’s case, nearly all of the developers will be owned by Nokia. It’s a very different situation.”

While that never really addressed Panagrossi’s point, you could argue that Symbian’s opinions are pretty irrelevant now that they will disappear in to Nokia’s vast expanse