China’s State-Owned Mobile Company Joins Linux Foundation

The world’s largest mobile enterprise has just joined the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member.

The company in question is China Mobile, the largest and most valuable nationwide telecom enterprise in the world. With 570 million subscribers, it also has the largest user base of any such company.

Linux is a collection of free and open-source software; Linux operating systems are the most popular FOSS OSes in the world. The goal of the Linux Foundation is to protect, standardize and promote the Linux platform by giving it the services and features to compete withproprietary software.

In an announcement, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin said, “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.

“For The Linux Foundation, the opportunity to present Linux as a choice to 560 million users is a power-packed proposition.”

Both in terms of getting Linux products — particularly Linux mobile OSes, which currently account for a paltry 3% of the U.S. smartphone market — in front of users and getting more developer contributions to its ever-growing platform, the move is a huge win for the Linux Foundation.

Sure, there’s some inherent irony in the mass adoption of FOSS software and principles by a country that’s traditionally been closed to information technology in many other ways — and much has been made of that ongoing debacle by mainstream media and tech blogs.

But what’s less discussed — but much more important to this deal — is the fact that Chinese commercial and educational entities already make up a large part of Linux’ user base. Moreover, Chinese developers have been making great contributions to the Linux kernel lately. And Chinese Internet and hardware companies — again, some of the largest in the world — also use Linux for infrastructure and on their devices.

China Mobile will be the tenth Linux Foundation Gold Member. Other Gold Member companies include Google, Cisco, HP and Motorola.

[via mashable]

Posted in: Cisco,Google,HP,Linux,Smartphone