Big tech companies don't always mean what they say when they make promises about open source.

But if there was any doubt that Intel is serious about its open-source mobile Linux project, Moblin, the company made a big stride toward dispelling them Wednesday as Intel chief Linux and open source technologist Dirk Hohndel invited the crowd at the OSCON open source conference--as well as open source developers everywhere--to jump in and take charge with the project.

The Moblin project, which began last July as an effort by Intel to create a unified software stack for smart phones, small mobile Internet devices, and Netbook-style mini-notebooks, has drawn support from a wide range of tech companies, including Adobe and RealNetworks.

Linux distributors such as Xandros and Canonical have both integrated aspects of Moblin into their mobile-centric distributions. Canonical's forthcoming Ubuntu MID edition, designed for Mobile Internet Devices, is built around Moblin.

But to pass the litmus test of the open source community, Intel needed to do more than release a software stack. It needed to release that stack to the free will of the Linux development community, and that's what Intel's Dirk Hohndel did today--sort of. More precisely, Hohndel promised to release Moblin to the community "in the next few weeks."

Moblin 101

Moblin 1.0 is nearly ready for release, and it consists of seven interconnected projects--from an image creator that developers can use to build device-specific OS installations to a platform-specific kernel and user interface framework to a Web browser and multimedia support components.