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Comment by DrSprout | Hacker News Reader

Open source only works when you have massive competing companies contributing.

I'm not saying that, in fact I agree with you. However, 6 giant corporations all trying to align themselves to a common strategy doesn't work. Most contributions to open source by big companies are self serving: they enable profits for the company. I can't see TI doing work to enable Freescale to expand its marketshare.

In the best case the outcome will be the lowest common denominator: something so abstract its of no use to anyone doing real work.

I'd be happy to be wrong, but I don't think I am.

TI and Freescale are both in the same boat when we're talking about mobile Internet devices. They both have a variety of products that currently have a very small set of specialized software that runs on them. In order to gain traction against the x86 desktop and iPhone OS, they need platforms like Android and MeeGo to work flawlessly with minimal configuration on all of their hardware.

We're quickly getting to the stage where we want these devices talking directly to printers. All of the companies involved want to make sure that as much as possible, printing companies can write one driver and have it work anywhere. Better still would be if no custom driver were needed.

There's also the current issues with upgrading existing devices to newer Android releases. If they can streamline the low-level stuff to get updates out quickly on Google's heels, it will add considerable value to their products.

So there's definitely a lot of motivation for them to clean up the embedded Linux ecosystem.

That's a pretty absurd statement. Are Nokia and Novell massive competing companies? KDE seems to be doing pretty well. There are also plenty of small successful open projects like battle for wesnoth or the innumerable open libraries that make a programmer's life so much easier. Major projects tend to attract corporate sponsorship as they become useful, and paid developers go at a faster pace than hobbyists, but to say that open source requires contribution from huge companies is just silly.

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