LiMo Foundation News

  • Open Letter to the Wholesale Applications Community

     

    Dear Industry Colleagues:

    Further to the public announcement of 15 February 2010, I am very pleased to write this open letter to the initiators of the Wholesale Applications Community on behalf of the Board of LiMo Foundation offering a) our full support, b) our committed participation, and c) our immediate practical assistance in a spirit of whole-industry cooperation.

    It is clear to us that the highly complementary areas of focus, shared belief in true openness and common industry vision create an exceptional opportunity for deep and long-term collaboration between LiMo Foundation and the Wholesale Applications Community to release unfettered innovation across the industry and fully ignite the mobile internet in a way that is compelling and life-enhancing to consumers everywhere.

    LiMo Foundation was launched in 2007 as a constitutionally open, transparent and non-discriminatory industry consortium with the sole purpose of collaboratively delivering a competitive Linux-based device software platform to the industry upon which commercial innovation can freely thrive without brand or business model conflict with the underlying platform. Since LiMo’s launch, three major releases...
  • LiMo Foundation Handset Lineup Expands With New Feature-Rich Devices From ELSE, NEC, Panasonic

    Newest LiMo handsets combine style, durability, and in-demand high-performance functionality

    BARCELONA, Spain, February 15, 2010 – LiMo Foundation™, a global consortium of leading companies from throughout the mobile industry, today announced new LiMo compliant handsets from manufacturers ELSE, NEC, and Panasonic Mobile Communications. These models bring the number of LiMo devices announced to date to fifty.

    “We welcome the arrival of these innovative new devices which attest to the richness and versatility of LiMo Platform,” said Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation. “The continued growth of LiMo devices is further endorsement of LiMo’s vision, mission, and technologies.”

    Designed to appeal to consumers seeking elegant, feature-rich handsets, the new models combine next-generation functionality and reliable performance in an array of sleek, sophisticated device designs. Integrating advanced user interface technologies and critical functionality and reliability elements such as keypad-to-touchpad conversion, high-megapixel auto-focus cameras, waterproofing, and extended battery life will ensure a more immersive...
  • Mobile Industry Leaders Collaborate for On-Time Delivery of R3 LiMo Platform

    Latest release of mobile industry’s only independent handset platform imminently available

    BARCELONA, Spain, February 15, 2010 – LiMo Foundation, a global consortium of leading companies from throughout the mobile industry, today announced the imminent availability of the new R3 release of LiMo Platform. The updated platform features new support for Location Based Services (LBS) and contact management and extends existing features including support for application management, advanced UI and multimedia technologies, and enhanced security and networking.

    “Delivery of R3 of LiMo Platform is a further important delivery milestone and again for LiMo Foundation demonstrates that powerful likeminded companies can work together practically to create a common platform that is evolved and governed through a truly open and independent process,” said Morgan Gillis, executive director of LiMo Foundation. “This latest update to the LiMo Platform also furthers LiMo’s leadership in commercially unifying mobile Linux technologies for the benefit of the whole industry.”

Avoiding the pitfalls of Open Source – Part 2
Written by Andrew Till, VP Solutions Management, Teleca   
Thursday, 07 January 2010 09:29

 

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

One of the common debates in open source is how to make money from it in a way that is acceptable to the community.  In our experience there are a wide range of valid business models that can happily co-exist with using open source software or indeed providing support services to those that are engaged with the community.

For example, a number of companies build full software distributions, usually based on Linux, that include a wide range of open source software but fully integrate it into a useable platform.   Normally consultancy, support, maintenance and adaptation services are provided around these distributions.  Many companies, including Teleca, provide integration services taking open source components and integrating them in product base lines. Relying on the base open source components to build value added products is frequently not realistic and therefore, services designed to provide customisation or extensions to these components are perfectly valid business models.  These are many examples of companies that are making a strong living from working with the open source community.

 

Appreciate that people don’t like to pay ransoms

While there are many valid business models, there are also business models that can alienate the open source community.  One such model is what we call asking people to pay ransoms – i.e. contributing core engines or components to an open source community with the intent of then making users dependent upon you for overly expensive customisation and extension services. The community will quickly reject this model and before long your components will have been removed from the baseline in favour of alternative contributions.  It can be surprising how fast the community can move when faced with being held to ransom.

Maintenance is NOT free

While there are many good justifications for making open source contributions, expecting free maintenance is not one of them as the basic dynamics of open source quickly underlines.  Most open source projects and communities rely on the goodwill of the members; be it on their personal time or sponsored by their employer.  However, you cannot contract with the community to provide SLAs for maintenance support, achieve commitments for defect analysis, fix bugs or set bug fix priorities. So my advice is simple - if you are delivering a commercial product or service then you need a simple maintenance plan to support your code.


Summary

Hopefully, the learning’s highlighted in this article will help you to develop an effective and rewarding model for leveraging and engaging with the open source community.  The core theme is simple, plan in advance and think through not just what software components you want to leverage but your overall engagement model with the wider community as the move to leverage open source has ramifications that ultimately touch many if not all areas of a business.

 

 

 

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The LiMo blog will include a rich assortment of entries reflecting perspectives that span market segments, geographies, and job responsibilities.  Our mission is to engage in direct conversation with a variety of stakeholders and thought leaders – this dialogue will be valuable as LiMo’s members work to collaboratively advance the LiMo Platform for the mobile industry.  The blog posts reflect the opinions of the individual bloggers, and not necessarily that of LiMo or its members.

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