Stakes in the Smartphone Showdown have gotten even higher. Mozilla has announced ‘Boot to Gecko‘, its new project to offer an open alternative mobile OS. Mozilla says Boot to Gecko will be made available to the public as it is written, making it even more open than Google’s Android.

Andreas Gal of Mozilla says

“We will do this work in the open, we will release the source in real-time, we will take all successful additions to an appropriate standards group, and we will track changes that come out of that process. We aren’t trying to have these native-grade apps just run on Firefox, we’re trying to have them run on the web.”

Android’s increasing success is due to its openness and the large developer community that has risen from it contrary to Apple’s closed iOS. Although Android is open, Google closes insight into the development process for Android and releases the source code for new android projects way after the binary releases(An example is the source code for Gingerbread 3.0).

It’s also important to note that Boot to Gecko will run on some Android Kernel and use some Android driver codes to enable it to run on Android devices. Ergo, Android’s openness has created a competitor that might eat its head off.

What do you think about this? Can Mozilla take advantage of its Firefox developer community to port this or does Google need to close some part of Android to slow down the competition. Leave us a comment.

Source: TheNextWeb via CNET via Mozilla

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