Now, the new Linaro Partner Program hopes to enable ISVs, software service providers and device manufacturers to dedicate engineers to working with Linaro on projects of common interest.

Canonical, Thundersoft, Mentor Graphics, Genesi and Collabora are among the companies already involved through the program.

"Linaro is essential to the continued expansion of open source software on the ARM architecture," said Steve George, vice president of business development at Canonical. "As a member of the Linaro Partner Program, we ensure it's quick and easy to develop and use the best open source technologies on ARM."

'Easier, Faster and Less Expensive'

The development board from Linaro and Samsung, meanwhile, gives software developers low-cost access to the high-performance Exynos mobile computing platform with features including the latest multi-core Cortex-A9 CPU and multi-core Mali400 GPU with 1GB of high end DDR3 memory.