Asian consumer electronics companies have formed a consortium to speed the adoption of Linux in consumer electronics devices. The CE Linux Forum (CELF) has been seeded with $16,000 from Sony and Matsushita, which markets goods under the Panasonic brand. Samsung, Sharp, Philips, NEC, Toshiba and Hitachi are amongst the founding members.

The initiative loosely mirrors the cellphone manufacturers' decision to create the Symbian project, to promote a common platform. However cellphones are one of the items on the CELF to-do list.

It's a blow for Microsoft, which sought to make its own CE offering more flexible recently. "Microsoft collects its licensing tax, as usual, but now gets third-party performance tuning, hardware support and other help for free," we noted at the time.

And it's terribly unjust to Redmond. $40 billion in the bank, no competition. and all they keep doing is ganging up on you. And all you want to do is help, by promoting the horizontal model which … brought you $40 billion in the bank and no competition. ®

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