Linux In Your Ear: Getting Louder, Or Softer?Linux In Your Ear: Getting Louder, Or Softer?

Time to revise another assessment. It looks like it isn't going to be a question of "will your next phone run Linux?" but "which Linux is it?" Between Android branching out into set-top boxes and both Panasonic and NEC pulling the covers off new LiMo-driven phones (and Motorola also in that running), the mobile market's becoming a Linux market ... even if the word "Linux" is still not likely to garner more than a blank stare from most people. After the Year of the Linux Desktop, here's the Year of Linux As A Soft Power.

Soft, which means for the most part invisible. If you're a guy who doesn't work in IT but you have a Linux-powered phone, a Linux-powered multimedia installation in your car dashboard, a Linux-powered DVR attached to your TV and maybe a few other "Kernel By Linus" goodies lying around, there's no guarantee the word Linux will even ring any bells.

So why should it? The only way I see this being a bad thing is if the folks who want Linux to thrive are also obsessed with Linux becoming a household name. That may be possible, but only at the price of damaging what Linux is meant to be. Is Linux meant to be a household name, or is that just a bad idea?

An odd parallel comes to mind with the way Sun has tried to brand Java as aggressively as possible. My phone (well, the one before this one, anyway) would pop up a "Powered by Java" splash screen whenever I'd fire up one of the Java apps I'd downloaded to it. Likewise, my copy of PowerDVD has a "Java Powered" logo on its opening screen. Not that most people will care, of course -- under-the-hood technology branding scarcely does more than clutter up the outside of your device with that many more stickers you have to peel off after you take it out of the box.

And maybe that's how it should be. Phones (or set-top boxes, or what have you) that work great no matter what the technology should be the most important thing -- and if the technology to make great phones / boxes / whatever lies with another platform, that's where people will go. Linux has to deliver on that end, and if it doesn't everyone involved will go somewhere else. (That could very well be another Linux derivative, but what if it's not?)

I'm not accusing anyone in the parties above of trying to make Linux into a household name at its own expense, etc. But the part of the Linux ecosphere that deals with the general public -- the phone people, the device people -- are going to have to make that decision real soon now.

[Follow-up: Turns out there may be some confusion as to whether or not Motorola is actually using Android in their set-top devices. Turns out KDDI's device is indeed Linux-based, just not Android-based.]

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