On Wednesday, the LiMo Foundation announced the that will be hosted by the Linux Foundation. Although LiMo's announcement didn't mention Intel or Meego, that it would back Tizen at the expense of Meego.

Meego was formed early last year through the merger of two separate OS projects at Intel and Nokia. However, it has struggled to get off the ground and Nokia introduced its first Meego phone only this week.

Because Meego netbooks are "fairly well-established," Intel will add APIs (application programming interfaces) to ensure applications written for them will work in Tizen, said Imad Sousou, director of the Intel Open Source Technology Center. Asus, Dell, Acer, Lenovo, HP and Toshiba have made Meego devices, but they have only a minimal presence in the market.

"On mobile, obviously, the situation is different in terms of deployment," Sousou said. Since there are few Meego phones in use, Intel has decided not to encumber Tizen with legacy APIs, he said.

Tizen will reuse a fair amount of Meego, according to Sousou. Several components from Meego, including the file system and the Linux OS distribution, will be used in Tizen. Other features that are already shared between Meego and LiMo, another open-source phone platform, including a lot of the middleware and the connection management system, will also become part of Tizen.