GPE Phone Edition

Mission Statement

GPE Phone Edition is a development project to develop open source software for mobile phones. It is not meant to become a full product - a lot of additional parts are needed to achieve this. G(PE)² will provide a significant part of the implementation but it is up to other projects and integrators to build a fully product from it.

In this sense G(PE)² provides the most important building blocks rather at application level / userspace, i.e.:

GUI framework
Application management framework
Basic applications using the GUI (phone call application, simple addressbook, etc.)
Service enabler, i.e. libraries and daemons that enable UI applications to actually perform their duty but also to share functionality between applications (like a phoneserver, enabling and managing application access to the phone modem hardware, etc.)
t.b.d.: Application security framework to ensure handset and network security

We strongly belief that such a framework and application stack is needed since mobile Linux and open source in the mobile software world will gain more and more importance.

But the mobile world, especially mobile phones, is different to the world of PCs, workstations and servers. While on workstations and servers the operating system can be chosen by the user, mobile devices come with a factory installed and in most cases not exchangeble system. Especially in the mobile phone area this has profound reasoning.

The only way to penetrate that area of devices for the open source movement is to provide a suitable software stack to manufacturers and providers that can be adopted and customized by them so that devices one day will be shipped by default equipped with it.

A requirement to achieve broad acceptance is to comply to known standards. Only if well known and accepted standards are used the adoption and deployment can be made painless and riscless enough.

The mobile area is full of standards but only little are freely available and usable. Some deeply technical standards can be used, like RFCs from IETF. But those only cover very specific technical parts. What is mostly not covered by those standards is the overall software architecture and APIs for mobile phones, and especially Linux phones.

The LiPS Forum aims excactly at this goal and also wants to make these standards publically available for public consumption and use!
So the best that G(PE)² can do right now is to follow as much as possible the standards and specifications by the LiPS Forum. The LiPS Forum is carried by "big players" in the mobile business, see LiPS Forum Members page. So if we keep close to their specifications the probability is high that the project's results will be used in real devices some day - hopefully sooner than later.

On behalf of GPE Phone Edition project, 9th of Febuary 2007, Nils Faerber