A senior executive at Google’s Android project has ruled out the prospect of joining forces with rival mobile open-source operating system consortia such as the LiMo Foundation, reports Information Week. “Unification for the sake of unification is not the path we decided to go down… having too many people on the design phase, especially early on, would have hurt the project,” Eric Chu, a group marketing manager with Google’s Android group, told the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco this week. “Instead of adding in compatibility for everything, we think it is important to clarify for developers the best possible direction and make it open-source so it is available to more people,” he told Information Week in a later interview. Chu’s comments appear to quash recent analyst speculation that Android, LiMo and Symbian Foundation could join forces to create a single open-source platform. Symbian chief executive Nigel Clifford has previously been reported as saying he would be “happy to collaborate” with Android.

According to the Information Week report, Google is currently testing its Android software for release under the Apache free-software and open-source license later this year. Chu said the core operating system was about 80 percent complete and it expects handsets from its hardware partners to debut about the same time. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported in June that some of the Android-based handsets have been delayed due to programming problems with the early Android code. The earlier WSJ report noted that T-Mobile USA will launch an Android-powered device in fourth-quarter 2008, but that both China Mobile and Sprint Nextel have delayed launches until the beginning of next year.