The GNU Project: Now and the Future;
Richard Stallman, Founder, Chairman of the Gnu Project, Free Software Foundation
Ravi Khanna, Director, Free Software Foundation
April 21, 2003

Emblix arranged for Richard Stallman and Ravi Khanna to speak to EMBLIX members on the history, status and future of the Gnu Project and the GPL, and how it relates to the Linux initiative and how Stallman views the issues and challenges for Embedded Linux in the context of the FSF. Ravi Khanna spoke to our members about the FSF, how it is organized and their activities.

Our activities with the ELC have been focused in the last year on these two fronts.

For the ELC Platform Specification, we have made the specification available to all EMBLIX members and support communications and feedback to the ELC regarding this specification from our Japanese perspective.

At the same time, EMBLIX has published English translations of our own specifications that have been the working group results of the Hybrid Working group and Development Tools Working Group. We have made these specifications available to the ELC executive committee and support the communication and feedback from the ELC regarding these specifications from the ELC perspective.

For working group activities, EMBLIX has been in communication with the ELC to share the experiences we have had with our working groups, the interests for new working groups and the opportunity to establish a joint working group between the ELC and EMBLIX.

EMBLIX has been developing the relationship with the Singapore EDB since our first mission to Singapore in 2002. Since then, we have received the EDB on 2 visits to Japan and have discussed opportunities for cooperation between EMBLIX, our members and the government of Singapore. Specifically in the last year, we were invited as guest speakers to the Asian Enterprise Open Source Conference that was sponsored by the EDB in October 29-31, 2003 in Singapore.

John Cheuck attended the AEOSC and presented a summary of EMBLIX and the embedded Linux industry/market landscape to the attendees in Singapore. At the same event, we were able to discuss our organization in context with other similar initiatives in Asian countries, specifically Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan.

As a follow up to our activities in Singapore and EMBLIX interest in similar initiatives in Asia, we decided to add an Asian expert to our internal advisory board. Dr. Kenneth Ong is a professor at the National University of Singapore specializing in embedded systems. His areas of research include real time operating systems and more recently, academic and vocational training programs for embedded systems engineers in the Asian region. Dr. Ong will be joining our board of international advisors in FY2004

Over the last 12 months, EMBLIX has also supported the international promotion of our consortium and its activities through its executive members.

We have taken every opportunity to leverage on the business trips and speaking opportunities of our executives to promote EMBLIX and our activities to related industry groups, academia and commercial interests groups. This support program has had little or no financial burden to EMBLIX and gives us exposure in focused industry/academic groups.

Some examples of this support includes:

John Cheuck – June 2003, Beijing, China; China Academy of Sciences, the HOPEN Project
Nakajima - November 2003 Singapore, March 2004 Thailand
Minakata – January 2004 Las Vegas, USA
Arima - Thailand