From freesmartphone.org

What this initative is really about

freesmartphone.org is concerned with Linux-based mobile devices, such as SmartPhones. These are devices which typically provide both Mobile phone and PDA functionality under one cover and are based on the Linux Kernel. SmartPhones share many characteristics with other types of portable embedded devices. The freesmartphone.org collaboration will attempt to leverage the work of other groups involved in such linux based portable embedded devices, e.g. PDAs, internet tablets, set-top-boxes, network routers, network attached storage devices, ...

freesmartphone.org is focused primarily on middleware services that are independent of the user interface layers of a particular platform. Such services can be utilized by user interfaces implemented with environments running on the X-Window system, environments running directly on frame buffer devices, and environments based on other user interface paradigms e.g. voice.

With today's technology, mobile equipment design is driven largely by power issues. The mobile phone must balance the requirement for continuous connectivity with the users desire for long battery life while still performing increasing numbers of functions within a single device. freemartphone.org is concerned with providing the middleware services that enable designers to meet such challenging user needs in mobile equipment based on the Linux kernel.

freesmartphone.org expects to build on the success of D-Bus as a practical and relatively lightweight mechanism for system level and session level IPC. It is expected that most of the services of the Mobile Terminal layer resulting from the freesmartphone.org collaboration will be provided through D-Bus interfaces and methods. Much of the early work of the freesmartphone.org collaboration will be focused on specifying a full set of D-Bus interfaces and methods necessary to manage the mobile terminal layer and how one or more daemon processors can be optimally partitioned to achieve this end.