GNOME Foundation Launches Mobile & Embedded Initiative

The GNOME Foundation has announced the creation of the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative (GMAE), a software platform for user experience development across a wide range of device profiles. The initiative aims to advance the use, development and commercialization of GNOME components as a mobile and embedded user experience platform.

Participants include industry leaders, expert consultants, key developers and community organizations. The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Platform is a subset of the proven, widely used GNOME desktop platform, focusing on software components shipping in production mobile and embedded products. Components already under consideration for future development include the Java Mobile & Embedded platform (Java ME), a geolocation service (GeoClue), a hardware information system (HAL), an audio management service (PulseAudio), and a mobile email framework (Tinymail). The GMAE Platform is distributed under the terms of the LGPL, which allows for royalty-free use in proprietary software products, but encourages contribution of platform code changes back to the community. The initiative enjoys strong support from industry and community leaders.