This is all about Tizen. Samsung, and its associates and partners in various markets around the world, knows that iOS can be competed with, rapidly, by a Linux-based alternative. It has been proven already with Android, and as we all well know .. there will be next generations.
Tizen could be a next-gen mobile/integrated platform, and it could well be that Samsung are the only ones who have anything to do with it, because there is one thing about a Linux-based approach: it is multi-variate. Tizen will be Samsungs Linux, but HTC might do something similar, and Creative Labs could even dust off Plaszma/ZiiOS and produce a shudder effect through the lower-end markets, too.
The Distro Wars won't be over for a while, I think, once this starts happening.
Edit: I want to add that I think that things like the Sharp/Samsung engineers' experience with AngstromOS and so on are sort of behind this.
These companies don't have what it takes to produce something as polished as Android. And even if they throw money at it and manage to do it somehow, they still do not have what it takes to build a developer community around it or a popular app store, like Google or Apple did.
Is anybody anywhere using the Samsung/Kies App Store for instance? It comes bundled on Galaxy S phones, I guess there are some people using it by mistake.
This effort can be easily underestimated, but even Microsoft is having problems doing it.
They have to get the hardware out there, first and foremost. Zii Labs (Creative Labs Plaszma OS partners) could have easily competed with iOS in its earlier days, if only they'd gotten the hardware out there. They lost because they didn't get things deployed; but factually the technology is there for a real ass-whooping, in the Mobile Linux-vs.-iOS department. They have to manage a good deployment, and with an investment like this it seems that they are gearing up to do so ..
Tizen could be a next-gen mobile/integrated platform, and it could well be that Samsung are the only ones who have anything to do with it, because there is one thing about a Linux-based approach: it is multi-variate. Tizen will be Samsungs Linux, but HTC might do something similar, and Creative Labs could even dust off Plaszma/ZiiOS and produce a shudder effect through the lower-end markets, too.
The Distro Wars won't be over for a while, I think, once this starts happening.
Edit: I want to add that I think that things like the Sharp/Samsung engineers' experience with AngstromOS and so on are sort of behind this.