Non-profit Consumer Electronics Linux Forum opens its doors

San Jose, Jan. 17, 2005 -- (MobileVillage) -- The CE Linux Forum (CELF) today announced its establishment as a California non-profit corporation. CELF's headquarters will be located in San Jose, Calif., and Scott Smyers, who had been the chair of the organization's steering committee, will serve as the chair of the CELF Board of Directors.

By incorporating as a not-for-profit organization, the CELF will be able to develop its activities in new ways. This will give the organization greater flexibility to fund development work in the open source community, and to create relationships with other organizations to further the group's goals.

The Forum was established in June 2003 by eight companies (Hitachi, Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., NEC Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Sharp Corporation, Sony Corporation, and Toshiba Corporation), to further enhance and promote the use of Linux in digital consumer electronics products. CELF membership now totals more than fifty companies.

The CELF maintains a collection of source code modifications for Linux ("patches") that tailor Linux for use in building consumer electronics devices, such as mobile phones, set-top boxes, and personal media managers. The first version of the patches was made available for download and review by the public in November 2003. In June 2004 the organization released Version 1.0 of the CELF specification and a reference implementation.

During 2004 the CELF also hosted a "Techno-Jamboree," an open engineering meeting for CE Linux development engineers, and was a sponsor of the Ottawa Linux Symposium.

The second CELF Plenary Meeting and its first US Technical Conference will be held in San Jose Jan. 25-26. For more information about the CE Linux Forum and a member list see celinuxforum.org.

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