LiMo Foundation Blog

LiMo Foundation has recently published a new version of the LiMo Platform and SDK Roadmap that describes our plans for the Release 3.0 of LiMo Platform in the near future, as well as information on a further release of the Platform and associated SDKs due later in 2010.

Roadmapping within an organisation such as LiMo that relies on voluntary contributions from its members is a significantly different activity from roadmapping within a conventional software company. In this post I'll briefly explore some of these differences.

Within a conventional software company, the roadmapping activity is ”conceptually” simple - in essence it's a negotiation between the marketing/requirements function of the company (which acts as a proxy for the customer) and the engineering/delivery function of the company. (As an aside the level of politeness and constructiveness in which this negotiation is conducted tells you a lot about the general health and likely effectiveness of a company; watch out if you're working inside a company where this negotiation is acrimonious and is conducted at full volume!).

The marketing/requirements side often need to strike a balance between serving the company's existing market and customer base versus attempting to address new markets and pursue new customers. In a company that has a clearly defined business and product strategy in place, this debate can be conducted in a structured and considered way. But in the absence of such strategies, or if the organisation as a whole does not buy into the strategies that are in place, then this debate can lead to a roadmap that satisfies no-one.

In Part 1 of this 2 part series, we looked at the circumstances whereby an open source strategy would make sense, the reason why “open is free” is false notion, the importance of choosing the right open source development model, contribution strategy and the license that best suits  you.

Protect your reputation - don’t contribute bad code

Always remember you only have one reputation and while it takes a long time to build, it can vanish in seconds.  It is just as important to test and debug code contributions to the community as it is for internal releases.  Contribute buggy code and you will quickly be seen as a poor community member and your code may not be integrated into future baseline releases.  Other impacts may include your ability to attract the right talent to your business, especially if you are looking to hire from within the open source community or on your overall brand especially if software quality is an essential brand ingredient.  That said, releasing alpha and beta code is perfectly acceptable providing you make it clear that this is what it is and document the known issues.   So, keep it clean, protect your reputation and you’ll become a respected member of the community.

Identify the right business model

The Ancient Greeks created democracy (or so I understand), and the concept has certainly stood the test of time. The establishment of democracy brings with it openness, transparency and empowerment to those that reside within the boundaries of the democracy.The French philosopher, Charles Montesquieu, observed that for a democracy to function, its existence requires a virtuous people where the characteristic means of achieving cooperation is the voluntary observance, not of laws, but of informal codes of conduct.

Such parallels with the LiMo Foundation are striking, for example LiMo has recently seen the  commercialisation of the second release (R2) of the LiMo Platform which was a result of multiple members working collaboratively together in a way that complied with the LiMo Bylaws, but importantly, the collaboration was in a much  deeper and more complex way than those defined by the LiMo Foundation Bylaws.

Another example of democracy in action within LiMo is the LiMo Foundation Board Election that determines which members will have seats on the LiMo Foundation Board during a particular year.  The election takes place during the Annual All Members’ Meeting in Barcelona to coincide with the Mobile World Congress event.  This year, the All Members Meeting will be held on Monday 15th February 2010 and will be followed by an Open Industry Event at 17:00 at the Barcelo Sants Hotel. If you would like to attend, please contact our Business Development Director, Andy Bush ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) to discuss further.

In the last few years the open source software movement has grown significantly from a trail-blazing group of visionaries to a mainstream movement that is touching almost all areas of the desk, server and mobile software worlds.Over the past decade Teleca has engaged in a wide range of open source mobile software projects and communities such as Android, Maemo, OpenMoko, etc. In this article, we attempt to use this experience to help you to successfully leverage open source software while avoiding common pitfalls and leave a mutually beneficial legacy for the open source software community.

In Part 1 of the article we’ll look at why you should or should not leverage open source, the “open is free” misperception, choosing the right open source development model, contribution strategy and the license that is best suited to you.

Why?  Rather than why not?

It is always extremely important to know why you have decided to take a particular course of action and using open source software is no different.  However, it is far too common to hear "why not" as the answer when asking company’s about their motivations to engage with open source communities.  As this article will highlight using open source software does not just impact a company’s R&D organisation but frequently touches many other functions as well.  It is therefore, vital to have a clear understanding as to why leveraging open source software is the right option for you.  This will also help to shape individuals' actions, provide them with guidance and help the company as a whole to shape its wider activities with regards to open source community involvement.

You are developing a Web application on a mobile device, however the Javascript is failing and you don't know why. Naturally you want to attach a debugger, set some break points and debug your application. Like you do already with Firebug.

However you can't do this on any mobile device I can think of!

Sure you can add alerts and "printf" your way to the answer, though that's an inefficient use of your time. Projects are likely to fail without a debugger.

And yet no Web runtime on a mobile device offers this facility. Failing Javascript is all the rage right now, since there is a bunch of fresh Javascript APIs being made available to Web developers.

Enter the BONDI SDK

LiMo Foundation and its Members owe a huge debt to the global Open Source communities that have built the software that lies at the core of all Linux distributions.  The economic significance of this collective effort was analysed in a White Paper produced by the Foundation earlier this year .  We acknowledge the obligations we have in relation to the use of Open Source software in the LiMo Foundation platform within our Open Source Policy available on our Open Source website.

Several of our Members have a particularly strong Open Source heritage and are actively involved within the community.  Lefty of ACCESS, who is one such Member, blogged after attending GCDS about the fact that a significant proportion of the LiMo Foundation R2 platform comprises community Open Source code.  Our Members who produce R2-based products will build on this source code.  As Andrew Savory, our Open Source Manager, pointed out a few days ago, LiMo Foundation itself could satisfy the terms of our obligations to the community by leaving it to our members to make the source code available, as Samsung have done in relation to the Vodafone 360 H1 handset here.

All indications are that the Google Phone is for real, with a heavy following of tweets, blogs, photos and news.

Google and the issue of its control over the Android platform and services have already made operators nervous in the past. Operators continue to tread warily when it comes to Android adoption - hedging bets but not wanting to miss out on the promised application ecosystem. The recent Google phone move (although an obvious next step for Google) will surely give OEMs cause for thought.

I have been in the position of General Counsel of LiMo for just over one month today and I am starting to feel like my impressions are no longer “first impressions” but still new!

I pulled up some notes on my impressions in my first weeks.   I remember thinking it felt like an organisation with clever, committed people.  I also have "lean" written in my notes.  Like many organisations today, there is more work to do than people to do it, but in LiMo spirits appear high and somehow people seem to get more done than seems possible to complete in a day.  I will certainly need to be running to keep up!

I also noticed that meetings here take place at the strangest times –like 11pm at night or 6 am in the morning.  I understand that this is a result of having members all over the world and trying to accommodate all of the different time zones.  This is truly the meaning and reality of being “always on”.

Democratic governance can present both interesting challenges and opportunities for its stakeholders - challenges, when trying to balance the business and competitive dynamics of member companies, and opportunities, when leveraging collaboration to stimulate innovation and achieving cost mutualisation.

3 years in and the LiMo Foundation is proud of how it has managed the challenges and created opportunities for its broad member community spread across the world.

What is becoming clear lately is that an Open Mobile Platform can provide the necessary flexibility to meet market specific needs. Most recently, an example of this came about in Korea with the inaugural meeting of KLEA (Korea LiMo Ecosystem Association), an independent group of companies agreeing to work together to stimulate innovation atop the LiMo Platform while boosting its commercialisation.

It was fascinating attending that inaugural meeting, from the variety of ideas discussed and questions asked, it became clear that, where innovation thrives, “one size” does not “fit all”. Common local market dynamics and nuances, commercial opportunities and specific cultural difference require a very specific organisation, and that is best performed at a local level, with of course, the right levels of support from the Foundation.

I readily anticipate seeing this “model” replicated across multiple regions, each having their own subtle (and not so subtle) differences, which allows for both differentiation AND innovation.

Watch this space!

A recent blog post by Peter Vescuso of Black Duck Software discussed the important issue of license compliance and what companies should do to achieve compliance. This resulted in some interesting comments and questions about LiMo Foundation's platform, which warrant a full post rather than brief comment responses.

So, on to the questions:

What will happen if some GPLv2 code finds its way to a much deeper part of the Windows kernel?

Whilst we can't comment on Microsoft's business strategies, it's worth noting an increasingly responsive and community-focussed approach to open source from Microsoft in recent months and years. There are many smart people at Microsoft who understand open source licensing and their commitments, and who are actively reaching out to open source projects to work with them. We can only hope to see increased openness in the future.

Is LiMo Foundation code Version 2 GPL and/or its derivatives GPL ?? I suspect it is... then where is the code ??? do you need to apply for 2K $ at least to get and develop code for the platform ??? is that compliant with GPL license ???

The LiMo platform includes code under a wide range of licenses, both proprietary and open source. As Lefty wrote, "The reference implementations in use by Foundation members contain upwards of 70% open source". The open source licenses are not just GPL - they include GPL, LGPL, MIT, BSD, X11 and many more.

We take our responsibilities under all these licenses, including the GPL v2, very seriously. We've used Black Duck's Protex product to help us with that. We constantly look at precisely what code is used, where it is used and how it is used.

The commenter asks "where is the code?"