OStatic tells us that Orange is killing its plan to release a phone this year based on Access Linux and wonders if this is a sign that Mobile Linux is in trouble.  I think outside of Asia that Linux-based phones are indeed going to be rare as phones running Google’s Android are nearing release.  One of the problems that seems to escape us is that there are often so many flavors of open sourced platforms and this prevents a de facto standard, which should be the biggest benefit of open source solutions.  It doesn’t matter if a platform is open source if it’s totally different (and incompatible) with other like open sourced platforms.  We see that on the PC front, especially the new netbook genre, as every OEM is using a different flavor of Linux for the OS and consumers are left confused.  Access Linux is likely to end up totally forgotten once Android is released since it has the muscle of Google behind it and is getting people excited.  When is the last time you saw the New York Times writing about Access Linux?