A new open source mobile Linux project has just been launched. The Tizen project combines the efforts of the LiMo Foundation, home of the Meego project, and the Linux Foundation, which will host it.

While Tizen development will be completely open and led by a technical steering team composed of Intel and Samsung, in many ways it marks an abrupt change of direction. In particular it signals the end of Meego.

A blog post on the MeeGo site answers the question, "why not just evolve Meego?:

We believe the future belongs to HTML5-based applications, outside of a relatively small percentage of apps, and we are firmly convinced that our investment needs to shift toward HTML5. Shifting to HTML5 doesn't just mean slapping a web runtime on an existing Linux, even one aimed at mobile, as MeeGo has been. Emphasizing HTML5 means that APIs not visible to HTML5 programmers need not be as rigid, and can evolve with platform technology and can vary by market segment.

According to its new site, Tizen will support multiple device categories, such as smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, netbooks, and in-vehicle infotainment devices. The first release of Tizen and its SDK is expected in the first quarter of 2012 and a Tizen developer website is planned to be available soon, providing resources, guidelines, tutorials and developer tools.

All they need now are some phones to run it on.

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or Facebook or sign up for our weekly newsletter.