[DrSprout]

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.