Mozilla, MontaVista, ARM, and others collaborate on a new/old device
I was surprised to see that a collection of seven companies - including Mozilla Corp., ARM, and MontaVista - are collaborating on a web-enabled mini-PC. Why surprised?
Because companies have been throwing money at similar ideas for the past decade, and always without success.
When I was at Mitsui Comtek in 1997, we built a similar device. A few years later at Lineo, we worked on something similar (though this time purely from the software angle).
Now MontaVista, a company with which I competed back in my Lineo days, is at it again, but this time hopes that greater openness can be the differentiator:
The platform might be similar to the one used by Nokia in the N800 web tablet, but will be different from a very important point of view: ARM Inc. is creating a completely open platform that will be shared with the open-source community....
And, voila! Openness will automagically translate into a winning product. Or not.
It's possible that this is an idea whose time has finally come, but my hunch is that it's a solution in search of a problem. ARM's stated hope that this Linux-based platform will translate into 90 million devices by 2010 is, well, hopeful. This idea - that of open-source hardware/software platforms like Chumby generating scores of new devices - has yet to bear fruit. Perhaps it will in this case, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
