Motorola taps Linux for MOTOMAGX platform

It's no secret that Unix/Linux provides a solid foundation for those looking to build advanced operating systems. It's also no secret that Motorola has a penchant for ridiculous-looking, capitalized homophones (MOTORIZR, anyone?). Keeping those two facts in mind, I suppose the latest news out of Linux World in San Francisco should come as no surprise: Motorola has taken the wraps off of MOTOMAGX, its next-gen, Linux-based platform for mobile handsets. Motorola hopes that MOTOMAGX will help the company "lay the foundation to deliver new levels of openness, flexibility, and support for third-party applications on Motorola mobile devices" and to that end, the company has committed to shipping around 60 percent of its handsets with MOTOMAGX on board within the next few years. The MOTOROKR Z6 and RAZR2 V8 phones will be the first to ship with the new platform baked-in, which could happen as early as Q4 of this year.

This is obviously good news for developers, who will now be able to create applications for the platform using Java ME. As a matter of fact, anyone who's interested in doing so can get started right away: MOTODEV Studio, MOTOMAGX's integrated development environment, is available for download now. While more open-source tech in the mobile world is definitely a good thing, you do have to wonder if having so many proprietary mobile Linux OSes (Palm, Qt, PalmSource) kind of defeats the whole purpose of an open operating system.

For more on MOTOMAGX:
- see this press release