ARM® is not so well known outside of its partnership. Its business model is to collaborate with our partners, helping to create low power, embedded systems. ARM processors are in many devices that today we take for granted; from web surfing mobile phones, tablet computers and high definition televisions. As part of creating processor designs, we have used open source software, including GNU tools and Linux®. Firstly to help design features, secondly to help prove that we’ve got the design right and thirdly to enable our partners and their customers to create great products. Over the years we’ve learned, sometimes painfully, how to work with the open source community to ensure that our technology is well understood and supported. It is not very well known, but ARM donates to many, many open source projects.
Over time, Linux has become more and more the basis for products and so has been adopted by a great proliferation of ARM based products. This innovation is good; we’re living in the future, using devices that would have seemed like science fiction 20 or 30 years ago. Less positive is that this variance in platforms can create fragmentation in code bases; slowing down this very innovation that we’re so rightfully proud of. This is where Linaro comes in. Linaro™ is a collaboration vehicle for ARM and its partners to work cooperatively with the various open source communities, adding engineers and hardware.
At Linaro we want to be different from other Industry led initiatives. We want to take the Arm community’s embedded engineers and work directly with the various open source projects helping in the best possible way. By writing code. We also believe strongly in being open; that is why all of our plans and code are all on-line.
For me, it’s been a really wild ride setting this organization up. I look forward to more months and years of excitement and achievement.
