Linux Foundation coordinates Intel's Moblin development

That's a good news indeed, that Intel's called The Linux Foundation to host and take care of the management behind the development of their former vendor-tied Moblin platform.

Moblin was created in 2007 by Intel as a platform for devices powered by their first generation of Atom processors, codenamed "Silverthorne", which landed on the market in 2008. Now that the new Atom generation, codenamed Lincroft, is about to be released (Q4 2009) Intel's has handled over the Mobile project to the Linux Foundation. This has officially happened on April 2nd 2009.

Intel's already a Linux Foundation member and has now taken a more important step in promoting the Linux ecosystem than merely financing the Foundation. But don't misunderstand me, with promoting I'm not stating that Intel's effort is a bare charity-driven promotion. This is the sort of business move are good for Linux. Obviously Intel's believes in Linux, as the lots of companies which had chosen this operating system as the engine for their product. Don't forget that if Linux's market share as a desktop system is ridiculous with respect to Microsoft's, the same is not for a lot of other real world technology from flat screen tv  to supercomputers, from navigation system to Nasa's Mars rovers and so on. With Linux Foundation's stewardship Intel can hope to increase its market share of its Atom processor especially in the view of the constantly rising mobile Internet devices (MIDs). The Linux Foundation, on its turn, will ferry Moblin to the vendor-neutral shores thus providing a new open source platform and libraries for the development of mobile systems such as notebooks and car computers or infosystems.
Linux vendors such as Novell are positively impressed by Intel's choice that will surely boost the Linux development and adoption in the environment of the mobile devices.
You can find more information by reading the announcement post on the Linux Foundation website.
What I deem more important about this is the fact that Linux, as a platform, is more and more getting support from big agents in the market. This is especially important because the war that Linux and its users fight on a day to day base is that of getting support for third parties software and hardware. What's more frustrating to be unable to exploit your new sleek mobile phone or portable media player and so on, because the manufacturer didn't even think about releasing the software/driver for Linux? And the most frustrating part is that you know that with modern programming languages (like Python) and software development toolkits (like Qt) it's not so hard to write a software that can run on Windows, Linux and Mac with minimum or even no modifications on the original source. These sort of battles can only be won through politics and public relations, that is to say creating a critical mass of alliances and support to induce the above mentioned vendors to take into consideration that their few Linux oriented customers deserve support the same way do their Windows oriented customers.