LiMo Foundation Blog

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?"

I am questioning the importance of the term "Open".  Is it really important to be "Open" in the mobile industry?

"Open Source", "Open networks" "Open platform" – these terms have become the favourite vocabularies of all the stakeholders in the industry and are being tossed around at the slightest opportunity.

The question remains “what is Open?”

Android, Symbian, iPhone..... these are all actually  “closed" environments calling themselves "open" while maintaining some sort of control.

"Open" in the above cases has nothing to do with what “open” means in the PC and Internet world.

Going back to basics, the Mobile Industry itself is not easy to enter, unless you are providing components given that the initial cost of entry is incredibly high.

Even amongst the MVNOs, the only player that can be called a huge success is Virgin Mobile.

Closely linked to the question of "Open Source" is the revenue generating potential of the different systems -   "Closed systems" or “closed systems called Open". In the end, whether these systems are closed or open, without continuous business revenue streams, they are not sustainable.

Currently there is a tendency for people to challenge you, with questions such as "How Open are you?" Isn’t the real question “how much value can you bring to the end-user?”

I do question the advantages of being "Open".

CLOSED and HAPPY! =NINTENDO DS

InformationWeek's Serdar Yegulalp makes the case that 'outing' a company (such as Microsoft) that inadvertently uses open source in a commercial product is not a constructive thing. Matt Asay points out on his blog on CNET that "We shouldn't expect open-source adoption to be flawless or painless" and companies -- even large, well run software companies -- will make mistakes. Microsoft made a mistake and ran into strong criticism this week when they acknowledged that a Windows 7 tool had GPLv2 code and that they had not met the license obligations. It makes for interesting headlines and generates a fair amount of hand-wringing, but does nothing to advance the cause of open source, which is really about community development and cooperation.  Microsoft will not likely get much credit for how they handled this issue from the ideologues out there, but I think they've done a good job: acknowledged the mistake, removed the objectionable code, and announced their intention to meet the obligations by making the source and binary files available.  Not bad I say.  And maybe not the response Microsoft would have made in the recent past.

1. Call a spade a spade

Before I even get involved, I want to know: what's in it for me, and why should I care. It's amazing how many organisations talk about addressable market or target technologies or available devices. Blah blah blah. I want to know: what's the future of your platform, how quickly can I be productive, and how can I get my apps in the hands of users. Seriously. Cut the fluff, cut the marketing, you're talking to a technical person here. We detect bullshit for a living. So: tell us what we get and when we get it. Clearly. Concisely. It's not difficult! In return, we might buy into your platform, and then you'll have an army of evangelists more useful than a thousand glossy corporate brochures.

2. Captain Awesome

There's a commonly-held myth that everyone develops for the iPhone because of the fantastic tools, or the fantastic documentation, or the promise of becoming an App Store Millionaire, or because the Reality Distortion Field made them do it. Well, they may all play a part, but the number one reason is this: a compelling device that people want to use. Compared to all that came before it, the iPhone was all about usability - even in the early editions of the operating system. If you don't have a compelling, awesome device, please stop asking me to develop for it.

3. Hide and Seek

So you have a compelling device. You want me to invest in your platform. You push me to your website. But then you're not prepared to let me see the details of that platform - technical documentation, wiki pages, forum searches - without forcing me to register. Why should I have to give you all my personal details when I'm not even sure your platform is viable or of interest until I've had a chance to review those materials? How are us developers supposed to share hints, tips, and pointers to useful information if it's all behind a registration wall? What's so top secret about those device APIs that you can't make them public?

4. Please Hold

The rest of the internet has accessibility-crushing CAPTCHAs and automated email verification ("click the link to confirm your account"). But your site is special, and so you give each and every sign-up request that personal bit of attention. You really want developers for your platform, which is why you make me wait 72 hours before I can login and download the material I seek. But honestly, a cooling-off period is good. You don't want me to hastily rush in and adopt your platform and start being productive. I need to take some time to reflect on my decision - time I can spend evaluating your competition. Just don't expect me to be back after those 72 hours, mmmk?

5. No really, who are you?

Please enter your login and password. My login might be my email address. It might be a username you asked me to create. It might be a randomly generated username from your firstname.lastname.integer mashomatic. I will never know, and you will provide no hint. Oh - and as a special bonus, I need a separate username and password for the forums, the download site, and the wiki. Because single sign-on is, like, so last century.

In fairness problems 3-5 are common to all sorts of websites, not just for developers. But you'd think if they got 1-5 nailed, it would be all plain sailing here on in. Dream on! As if that wasn't bad enough …

iPhone naysayers take note:  Apple just passed Nokia for handset maker profitability. Indeed, the iPhone appears not to be an ephemeral phenomenon but has turned into a juggernaut that is giving the world's only Tier 0 a run for its money.  Listen to this week's news: "Apple had $1.6 billion in operating profit in the quarter from its iPhone handset division, while Nokia had $1.1 billion in operating profit from its handset division.  The results are not entirely surprising given the disparate performances of the two companies in the quarter. Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones in the quarter and had its most profitable quarter ever, while Nokia shipped fewer handsets on a year-over-year basis, and saw its global smartphone market share decline from 41 percent to 35 percent."

Let's pause for a moment. Is the main point here that a strategy of building a differentiated device is winning out in the device maker market verses following a strategy of cost/productivity leadership?  Although Clayton Christensen argues that earning the biggest profits are at the points of proprietary integration, I believe a word of caution is warranted here.  Not everyone can pull an iPhone out of their hats, as evidenced by legions of devices deployed over the past 24 months (some belonging to Nokia) that have sought to catch at least a small wave left in the wake of Apple's revolution among mobile device investors.  This is why many established leaders in the mobile industry are moving more quickly to create ecosystems that innovate on a perceived commodity:  Open Source.  The many actors placing bets on these models - Moblin, LiMo, Maemo and Android - see community source (mind you, in the mobile world, a much different animal than the desktop world) as a vehicle to reduce mobile fragmentation by creating an open platform that still allows the OxM to differentiate in the highest layers of the stack.  In turn, this allows service providers to hedge their bets in the best of both vertical and horizontal worlds, by selectively on-boarding blockbuster handset designs while creating an innovation factory among a broad base of manufacturers. They hope to irrigate the market with great devices across terminal roadmap price points.  Vertical integration can be a winner, but horizontal integration will most certainly be a winner.

Introduction

In the first section of this article, we introduced some concepts underlying Privacy in a ubiquitous computing environment. In this section, we discuss the role of Open Source in greater detail in a ubiquitous computing environment. We frame our discussion within the context of Telecom Operators.

Topics like Machine to Machine (M2M) communications, Sensor networks and Ubiquitous computing have been on the research agenda for many years. However, today M2M applications are in the limelight since initiatives like Smart Grids provide a ‘killer application’ (and Federal funding!) for M2M communications. Simultaneously, with the rise of Web 2.0, we are also seeing the social and commercial implications of ‘harnessing collective intelligence’ – to borrow a phrase from the Web 2.0 world. In the near future, the application of Web 2.0 principles to devices could be a significant competitive advantage to companies who can successfully leverage this emerging domain.

Potentially, Telecoms has a key part to play in a wider M2M scenario. According to analyst firm Berg Insight, wireless M2M network connections will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 37.9 percent during the next five years, reaching 186 million connections globally, from 37.5 million in 2008.

This is a new and different world for Telecoms i.e. connections are sold indirectly (like in Amazon Kindle) and the Carrier often gets the cost of the download (ex a book) paid as well. In a smart grids scenario – we could see billions of devices transmitting very small amounts of ‘bursty’ data but at the same time, video surveillance data could be much richer. Thus, it is a complex environment for Telecom operators but also potentially, a more lucrative one.

Here, we discuss two questions in an M2M scenario:

a) Interoperability and

b) Privacy.

These two issues are interrelated since the ecosystem we implement impacts them both

Open source/Collaborative source development

Palm's recent announcements around the openness of their Application Developer Model did not garner as much attention as the other stories about Application Developers not making much money on Application Stores, despite the hype. However, in the current climate of closed Application Stores, Palm's plan is quite significant:

(1) Palm will allow developers to distribute their applications via a Web link (via Palm), that directly installs the Application to the device without going through the App Store

(2) No $99 developer fee for Apps that are released as open source

(3) Opening up of analytical data to developers, and

(4) No Palm review of applications that are published.