Motorola: Linux not secure enough; so much for free OS
WinInfo | at | by Mike
Mobile phone maker Motorola made news in February when it announced that it would be the first to deliver a cell phone based on Linux. However, those plans have changed dramatically. Just one month after making that announcement, Motorola now says that Linux isn't secure enough to support a market for third-party applications that target the phone. "The phone's operating system must be made secure so that, for example, badly written or malicious code cannot power up the modem and rack up charges on your bill," a Motorola spokesperson wrote recently. So for the foreseeable future, the company will use Java as the delivery vehicle for software on the phone, and Linux will take a back seat. Of course, outside the insular Linux community, no one really cares what software is behind the phone, they just want it to work. And that, incidentally, is a problem faced by Microsoft with its Smartphone initiative as well.