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Motorola Offers Mobile Framework for Open Source

Motorola is stepping the uncharted territories of open source software by offering its mobile Java technology to the open source community. Motorola hopes that by releasing its Mobile Information Device Profiles 3.0 specifications many people will be encouraged to develop Java-based mobile phone software. Developing Java-based mobile software is hard to accomplish, and the filed is regarded as highly fragmented.

"Right now, every handset manufacturer has their own test harness. There is no way to run a consistent test and we have thousands of tests on dozens of harnesses," said Mark VandenBrink, senior director and chief architect for Motorola Mobile Devices. "We`re offering test cases to it so there`s one unified test harness to make sure that [applications] interoperate." The problems, said VandenBrink, aren`t universal incompatibilities, but it`s the little changes around the edge of Java that make it difficult to write an application in MIDP that works on both a Motorola and Nokia phone, he said.

MIDP itself isn`t a major cost issue for licensees, it?s the test harnesses, which do not come from Sun. Sun only licenses the Java mobile framework but not a testing mechanism, resulting in incompatibilities between MIDP applications simply because they were tested on different MIDP-based applications.