The 3rd GNOME Mobile Summit being held as part of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin from the 8th to the 10th of April will be a forum where industry and community merge into one, enabling effective collaboration on adapting the GNOME platform to the needs of mobile computing.

The GNOME Mobile Initiative, which first met at GUADEC, the GNOME Users’ and Developers’ European Conference in 2006 and publicly launched in April 2007, is a community effort to ensure that free and open source software is optimized for the growing Linux-based mobile device space. The Initiative has already had several meetings, both formally and
informally, and garnered considerable community and industry support.

Dave Neary, the co-ordinator of the GNOME Mobile track at the summit, believes that this meeting will accelerate the adoption of the GNOME platform on mobile devices. “Members of the GNOME Mobile group have been realising the leverage that collaborating closely with a free software community can give. Improved time to market, reduced R&D and maintenance costs, and above all, a highly performant and capable application platform on which to build your applications.”

Up to this point, the focus has been on co-ordinating integration efforts and reducing the amount of code being maintained outside the project, but that focus is expected to change as the initiative continues to mature and grow.

Ross Burton of OpenedHand, recently appointed release manager of the initiative, outlines his plans for the future of the project: “We are now moving beyond the initial phase of co-operation which consisted in people centralising work which they had been doing inside their companies to the core products. The next step is a roadmap which will systematically address the needs of consumers of the GNOME Mobile platform and ensure that the work is done in the community, and the creation of a mobile-specific release set of GNOME and GNOME-related projects.”

GNOME Mobile has a growing number of members, including industry heavyweights such as Nokia, ACCESS and FIC, the support of mobile consortia LiPS, the Linux Foundation’s MLI and Moblin, and a growing number of independent developers and community projects.

“The GNOME Mobile Initiative is at the heart of almost every important open source mobile effort going on in the industry today. The mainstream free software technologies such as GTK+, Gstreamer, matchbox and many other vibrant community-based projects are the linchpins of efforts like the ACCESS Linux Platform, Nokia’s Maemo platform, and the LiMo Foundation Platform. GNOME Mobile is the leading edge of development for the most exciting device space in decades, the rapidly growing world of open source-based mobile devices,” said David “Lefty” Schlesinger,
Director of Open Source Technologies for ACCESS Co., Ltd., and a member of the LiMo Foundation Architectural Council.