Project Magenta Is Ambitious Linux-Based Mobile OS

Where most of the excitement exists today when it comes to operating system advancements is not in Windows and Mac. Nope, it's within the intensely competitive space that contains Android and iOS. And just like any strong and exciting segment in the consumer electronics industry, this market is now the target of a new initiative that wants to push its way to the front of the pack.

Enter Project Magenta. It is an open-source project that aims to offer the same kind of experiences that iPhone and iPad users are able to have, but without the need to own an Apple device. "Magenta is an implementation of Darwin/BSD on top of the Linux kernel. It is made up of a number of kernel and userland components that work together. It is fully binary compatible with iPhone OS 5.0 (as in, it uses the same binary format)," the official Project Magenta website states.

The eventual goal of Project Magenta is to create the iPhone OS 1.0 stack. "I think this is a pretty feasible goal, considering the fact that there are so many open source libs that can be used to replace the proprietary libs used by Apple," the project head writes. One limitation is that Project Magenta probably won't be able to run apps that live on Apple's App Store, but just replicating the iOS experience on generic hardware would be a great feat.

[via 9to5Mac]