Samsung Sponsors Enlightenment Development: New Light for E17

Under the cryptic title "Enlightenment working with top-tier electronics maker," Carsten Haitzler of the Enlightenment team issued a short memo on the E17 homepage November 18. In it he describes how support from a "top-5 electronics producer" will optimize touchscreens and small screens with some of the central components of the Enlightenment windows manager. The components include Elementary, Evas, Edje, Ecore, Eet, Eina and a few others.

Now Phoronix.com has shed some light on Haitzler's memo by revealing that the "top-tier electronics maker" is Samsung Electronics. The hint came from a rather obscure changeset notice in the Enlightenment project tracking system:

"Samsung Electronics just allowed ProFUSION to release Editje as LGPL-3. They are silently helping improve EFL [Enlightenment Foundation Libraries] and Editje is the first public product of their help. The software is still in early stages, but already does nice. Have a try! For that you'll need up to date python bindings (BINDINGS/python/python-elementary, edje, evas and ecore) and EFL."

Coincidentally, Samsung announced November 10 that it was launching a new Bada open mobile platform ("bada" meaning "ocean" in Korean). Linux wasn't mentioned in the context, but chances are pretty certain that Linux is involved. Bada's first release is not likely until sometime in 2010, so we'll have to wait until then for a complete enlightenment.