The LiMo Foundation, a collaborative project developing a Linux-based platform for mobile phones, announced Monday five new core members and seven associate members have joined the foundation.

Founded earlier this year, the LiMo alliance expects the first handsets using its platform will begin appearing on the market during the first half of 2008.

The new core members are: Aplix, Celunite, LG Electronics, McAfee, and Wind River. As the first commercial Linux platform and tools provider to join the collaborative, Wind River will work to minimize fragmentation in the mobile Linux market.

"Historically the market for Linux-based mobile platforms has been highly fragmented, leading to unwarranted complexity and excessive development cycles," said Jason Whitmire, general manager of Mobile Solutions at Wind River, in a statement. He added that he expects the foundation will be able to provide a mobile platform and "tightly integrated tools that lay the foundation for a stable predictable road map that handset original equipment manufacturers and operators can depend on."

The foundation is set up so that only core members can ship commercial products with LiMo middleware.

The founding members of LiMo are: Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone Group.

The new associate members are ARM, Broadcom, Ericsson, Innopath, KTF, MontaVista Software, and NXP B.V. Foundation membership is open to a broad range of providers including device manufacturers, operators, chip set manufacturers, independent software vendors, integrators, and third-party developers.