Samsung has been supportive of Tizen from the get-go, but now it seems to be taking a rather major step. They are merging their home-grown mobile phone OS, bada with Tizen.
With the convoluted road behind Tizen, its future had been uncertain till these announcements. Just recently, less than a week ago, the release of Tizen's source code and SDK was announced. This alleviated some of the worries about the project but was still far from being its salvation. Even though Intel is behind it, its previous failures to completely deliver MeeGo didn't help any.
bada, is already a tried and tested framework, and combined with Tizen it offers a complete package. There were also rumours recently of bada being open sources, and this -- although not the same thing-- goes a long way in explaining them as well.
The goal is to make it possible to create applications for Tizen using the bada SDK. Existing bada applications should continue to run, and of course Tizen's primary goal of running HTML applications means those will run as well.
Samsung has already claimed that it is possible that one or two devices running Tizen will be released this year, and that they haven't ruled out using Tizen in devices other than phones, such as TVs.
Samsung already offers phones running three different operating systems, bada, Windows Phone 7, and Android and it used to offer Symbian as well but dropped support for it quite a while back. With Tizen and bada merged they might just focus on differentiating themselves more by having more Tizen based devices instead of using third-party operating systems.
