Some of the giants in the technology world announced today that they have teamed up to for a new company called Linaro. The new company counts as founding members ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson, and TI. The goal of the company is to help the open source community developing software to run on ARM-based CPUs in smartphones, tablets, and other devices speed time to market.

Linaro plans to invest resources in open source projects that can be used on all Linux-based distributions like Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu, and webOS. The goal is to provide stable and optimized base for creating new optimized tools for developers along with kernel, middleware, and more validated for a wide range of SoCs every six months. 

The software and tools offered by Linaro will be aimed at a wide range of markets ranging including smartphones, tablets, DTVs, automotive entertainment systems, and more. The first product to come from Linaro will be tools release currently set for release in November 2010.

Tom Lantzsch, CEO of Linaro said, "The dramatic growth of open source software development can now be seen in internet-based, always-connected mobile and consumer products. Linaro will help accelerate this trend further by increasing investment on key open source projects and providing industry alignment with the community to deliver the best Linux-based products for the benefit of the consumer."

ARM, IBM, Freescale, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and TI will all align their open source engineering efforts within the Linaro company.

"ARM and our partners have a long history of working with, and supporting, open source software development for complex SoCs based on the ARM architecture," said Warren East, ARM CEO. "As a founding member of Linaro, we are working together with the broader open source community to accelerate innovation for the next generation of computing, focusing on delivering a rich connected experience across the diversity of devices in our daily lives."

Lantzsch told CNET News, "Imagine two tablet makers going to the same silicon vendor. Let's say Texas Instruments in this case. And both want to get a tablet into the market and both want to do that, for example, on Android. What you'll find is there are differences in the versions (of Android). And then you'll have other tablet makers wanting to do a tablet on Chrome or MeeGo." Lantzsch continued saying that Linaro will help companies in these instances to streamline the process of bringing a product to market.