Linaro announces Qualcomm as the latest industry leader to become a member

[Cambridge, UK; 20 February 2014] Linaro Ltd, the not-for-profit engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM® architecture, today announced that Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. (QuIC) has joined Linaro as a Club Member.

Linaro now has a total of 25 member companies working together to accelerate open source software development for the ARM architecture.

As the ARM architecture advances rapidly with the delivery of 64-bit low power processor cores, the benefits to be gained from collaboration on common open source software across the industry increase. Linaro’s goals are to enable more rapid innovation in the industry through using shared resources to engineer common software elements, enabling each member to focus more of their own resources on product differentiation.

QuIC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, and it not only brings a history of innovation in wireless technology into Linaro, but also adds its extensive open source development experience to the 200+ open source software engineers already working in Linaro to accelerate the delivery of open source software across the industry.

The major difference between Linaro and other collaborative open source organizations is that Linaro focuses on engineering and implementation rather than the agreement on and definition of standards. Linaro and QuIC expect to derive mutual benefit from working together through a shared focus on open source software.

“We are very pleased to welcome Qualcomm as a new member of Linaro”, said George Grey, Linaro CEO. “There is clear synergy between QuIC’s open source work for Qualcomm products and Linaro’s open source engineering for the ARM architecture. We look forward to delivering high ROI to Qualcomm through shared engineering across the Linaro membership.”

Jason Bremner, Senior Vice President of Product Management for Qualcomm said, “Qualcomm has a rich history of supporting and contributing to the open source community from the launch of the first Android device in 2007.  Through becoming a member of Linaro we have an opportunity to extend this commitment into new areas and further drive open source innovation through industry collaboration.”

About Linaro
Linaro is the place where engineers from the world’s leading technology companies define the future of open source on ARM. The company is a not-for-profit engineering organization with over 200 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top three company contributors to recent Linux kernels (LWN lists Linaro as the number 2 company contributor to kernels 3.12 and 3.13 and #3 to kernels 3.10 and 3.11: http://lwn.net/Articles/579081/ , http://lwn.net/Articles/570483/ , http://lwn.net/Articles/563977/ , http://lwn.net/Articles/555968/ .).

To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro’s engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org.

About Qualcomm
Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) is the world leader in 3G, 4G and next-generation wireless technologies. Qualcomm Incorporated includes Qualcomm’s licensing business, QTL, and the vast majority of its patent portfolio. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, operates, along with its subsidiaries, substantially all of Qualcomm’s engineering, research and development functions, and substantially all of its products and services businesses, including its semiconductor business, QCT. For more than 25 years, Qualcomm ideas and inventions have driven the evolution of digital communications, linking people everywhere more closely to information, entertainment and each other. For more information, visit Qualcomm’s website, OnQ blog, Twitter and Facebook pages.

Contact Information

Steve Taylor

Executive Director of Marketing

Linaro

media@linaro.org