Apparently, Mozilla, the company that made the happy alternative to the Microsoft Web browser, is now targeting smartphones as a place where an open-source product can co-exist. The overall plans are vague, but I think the idea is good. Here is a snippet from a New York Times report on this development:

In recent months, Mozilla has been developing its own open-source smartphone operating system, Boot 2 Gecko. Its published product road map says Boot 2 Gecko will be demonstrated in products before the end of March and will ship in phones by the second quarter of this year.

Mozilla is expected to announce handset and carrier partners at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which starts next week. Brendan Eich, Mozilla's chief technology officer, said in a recent Twitter message that Boot 2 Gecko would be appearing at the conference "with partners."

The gotcha here is the "with partners" clarification on the rollout. This means some makers will be there and the way these things usually work, the software will only run on a limited number of phones.

Ideally, an OS like this should be something which I can download and then boot on a Nokia 710, a Samsung Galaxy, a Motorola, or any phone that uses a screen for a keyboard. It might even run on an iPhone. I am not sure what difficulties are ahead for such an initiative if hardware isn't as standardized as something like a PC computer.

From what I can tell, the makers of handsets are constantly tweaking the products. This results in all sorts of problems for the OS. Google's , for example, cannot work on some models of phones that run other Android implementations just fine.

Luckily, when people work on operating systems for broad-based, non-proprietary systems, they have to live with this agony. That's the bad news. The good news is that perhaps this is just a test of skill sets to get its feet wetin other words, moving from a smartphone OS to a computer and tablet OS.

Let's face it. Microsoft is headed down the road to rinky dink-dom with its Windows 8 OS and the trend toward tiles, tiles and more tiles. Microsoft has wanted to dumb down the OS as much as possible since the days of Microsoft Bob. It indeed has competition with Linux but there has yet to be a compelling enough Linux GUI to catch fire. Linux would be an overnight success if you could show some features to people who'd react with, "Wow, that is so cool. I want it."

That's kind of what you have to do to be a success. So far, it hasn't been done, despite many of the cool UI tricks that have been developed.

Let's hope that Mozilla will be successful with this phone OS idea and it will prompt the company to go to the next steps, which would be a tablet OS then a PC OS.

And let's face it, everyone would like to see a new direction besides Microsoft and Apple. The flaws from the early days of both systems are still with us. This includes the inability to do a genuine indexed file system that would make full search capability fast and easy. There are a lot of ways to improve the OS. All you have to do is visit a few forums and even look at what Microsoft continues to promise, but never delivers.

The problem with open source, and Mozilla in particular, is the time it takes to come to market. Open-source development takes too long. While Mozilla can probably do the phone OS quickly, anything more than that might not be possible with an open-source crowd.

It could start with Linux.

But Linux became a hodgepodge of forks that confuse the market so much that nobody trusts it. I cannot tell you how many supposedly great distros of Linux were unable to load and boot on various PCs I use. There is always some glitch.

Mozilla has the money and the wherewithal to potentially bust up the OS monopoly if it puts its mind to itbut it cannot just be another Linux distro. It could be built like Apple's Mac OS on a foundation of BSD and unique code on top of that.

I say, encourage these people and see what we get.