The latest member to join the Open Handset Alliance (News - Alert) is the Device Software Optimization (DSO) company Wind River Systems, which will contribute to the alliance as a Linux commercialization partner.

Wind River (News - Alert) stated that it will play a critical role in helping companies bring their mobile products to market based on Android, the open and free mobile platform.

“Throughout its 25 years of leadership in the device software industry, Wind River has developed the technologies that help transform industries, and we believe our contributions to the Open Handset Alliance will remove the barriers that stand in the way of progress in the mobile device market,” Ken Klein, CEO and president at Wind River, said in a press release.

Klein also indicated that his company joined the Alliance to accelerate the de-fragmentation effort in open source mobile solutions. He explained that the Open Handset Alliance device manufacturers and other OEMs can work with Wind River to port the platform onto their respective hardware platforms, and optimize it based on their specific requirements, including any necessary tuning of the Linux kernel.

The company is also expected to provide the Linux support necessary for OEMs and ISVs to complete their integrations quickly and effectively, simplifying the development and distribution of mobile applications.

Open Handset Alliance is a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies, which have come together to solve mobile platform fragmentation and escalating software development costs. The alliance will work on developing applications on the Android platform. Members of the alliance include HTC, Motorola, T-Mobile (News - Alert) and Sprint-Nextel, Qualcomm, Nusance, Aplix and others.

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Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.