| LiMo publishes the list of open source components in its platform |
| Written by Mal Minhas, CTO, LiMo Foundation |
| Friday, 18 December 2009 11:11 |
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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.
However, we believe it is important to be graceful rather than reluctant about our use of Open Source software. This means being more transparent to the community about our use of OSS technology. Accordingly, we have just published a listing of all the OSS components used within the LiMo Foundation R2 platform. This is the platform used within the 360 H1 and M1 handsets and will be the base for significant commercialisation activity by our Members in 2010. The full LiMo platform today is a mixture of Open Source software and components licensed under our own Foundation Public License. The non-OSS components are included to address those areas that are not currently available at a commercial grade level through existing mobile-centric OSS projects today. Examples include telephony and location based services frameworks. Our Members have collaborated to build the LiMo platform on predominantly community open source software in order to reduce the increasing cost of the software bill of materials associated with modern mobile form factor devices. These costs are being driven by two significant factors: i) Consumer expectations in terms of handset features which are increasingly demanding of the core platform, ii) Increasing consumer demand for connected/web applications requiring investment in backend infrastructure. In this environment, our Members see it as essential to reduce the cost of the commodity elements of the core handset stack in order to focus on differentiating features at the user experience and service delivery layer. Our listing of the OSS modules within the LiMo R2 stack is, we accept, a modest start in being more transparent, but we hope it gives the global OSS community a clearer sense of the LiMo platform and its broad system architecture. By examining this listing it is clear that we build upon key components within the GNOME Mobile stack . Indeed as a neutral, non-profit, collaborative mobile industry consortium with the express purpose of creating an open, hardware-independent, Linux-based software platform for mobile devices we have a lot in common with GNOME Foundation and we hope to work more closely with them in 2010. Of particular interest to us is to encourage a debate on the value of engagement . We aim to build upon this simple listing in 2010 so stay tuned for further LiMo announcements in relation to our engagement with the Open Source community. A number of us will be at FOSDEM in Brussels in early February and hope to meet up with the GNOME folks and others of you out there. Do get in touch !
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