LiMo Foundation Blog

On 10 Aug 2009, Telecoms.com published their list of the 40 most influential persons in the Mobile Industry.  According to Telecoms.com, this list “gives an idea of who some of the most powerful people in mobile are” and LiMo's Executive Director, Morgan Gillis, was seen as having “the responsibility of proving that an environment (free of a corporate leader) can generate an operating system that is truly competitive to those that are more obviously steered.”

Morgan Gillis joined the LiMo Foundation as Executive Director in August 2007. He has overall responsibility for leading the Foundation and all operational affairs including marketing, membership development, commercial and legal. Prior to joining LiMo Foundation, Gillis served for six years as the operational board member for Symbian Limited, with global responsibility for sales and professional services. He established licensing agreements with all major handset makers, negotiated global agreements with several Tier One operators and oversaw the support of numerous customer implementation projects which helped establish the smart phone as a new industry category.

Before entering the mobile industry, Gillis held CEO and managing director positions with two leading European IT services businesses. He holds a Master's degree in mathematics and computer science.

The mobile phone has become an important target for third party developers over the last few years, lured to the form factor by its novelty and by the possibility of making money from mobile App Stores.  Many will have come from a desktop or web background and may not be aware of the differences you encounter when developing for a mobile environment.  In particular, a modern mobile phone remains a constrained environment in several important ways, which a mobile developer should pay attention to when implementing applications:

* Screen size - it's an obvious point but a mobile phone application has  less screen real estate to play with than a desktop or netbook.

* Battery life - battery technology has not advanced as rapidly as the phone software capability.

* Connectivity - even today with ubiquitous mobile coverage, you cannot assume continuous connectivity.

* Bandwidth - the cost of data usage was a significant impediment in the early days of mobile internet but is less of an issue now with “all you can eat” tariffs.

* Memory - again this used to be a more significant issue in the past for mobile devices but with phones like the 32GB iPhone, it is much less so.

With these constraints in mind, it's possible to provide some practical guidance for mobile application developers as outlined below:

The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit is one of the major free and open source community events this year. Up until 2009, the GNOME desktop developers had the GUADEC conference, and the KDE developers had the AKaDEmy conference, in separate locations at different times. In order to provide greater opportunities for cross-desktop discussions, collective work on shared components, and general community building, it was decided to have both conferences at the same time, co-located in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. This year's conference(s) attracted over 1000 attendees, not just coders, but localizers, writers, marketers, legal experts, artists, photographers, and users who want to share feedback and talk to the people making the software they use.

Conferences like GUADEC and AKaDEmy (and FOSDEM, and LinuxTag, and a host of others, large and small, general and specialized, around the globe), are long-standing traditions. Some, like the Linux Symposium, the oldest of the community conferences, have an academic air, jury papers for inclusion and publish proceedings. Most are a lot more informal, but all include a combination of a series of presentations, demos, unstructured "birds of a feather" sessions on specific topics of shared interest, "lightning talks" (5 minute, single-topic presentations), some parties in the evenings and a lot of time and space to work on coding, designing, discussing and meeting other people face-to-face.

Mobile Web Runtimes supporting Web Widgets have been the focus of a lot of development since 2007. OEMs are even integrating Web Widgets on feature phones – most OEMs have at least one phone on the market today with their version of Widgets and a Web Runtime. Operators are busy standardizing in JIL and Bondi. Palm has bravely gone the full distance with an application development model that is completely Web technology driven, though for many, the verdict is still out on that one, e.g. http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2009/07/palm-webos-mojo-sdk-sadly-impotent-as-expected.

Developer uptake has been a challenge for the mobile industry. Ease of mobile application development is one of the main barriers, some of the others being locked devices and highly fragmented C/C++ development. Web Widgets however, are easily accessible to the plethora of web developers familiar with HTML, Javascript, AJAX and associated technologies. What has made Web Runtimes prevalent is the easy accessibility to next generation web technologies provided by mobile friendly Web Engines, especially WebKit. Starting with Nokia's S60 and Apple's iPhone Browsers, WebKit based browsers and libraries are the defacto standard today on most open platforms, apart from being actively deployed on feature phones. WebKit makes it easy for OEMs to invest in browser technology today without the danger of being obsoleted tomorrow.

The mobile market has always been attracted by the idea of “write-once-run-everywhere” for every new Application Runtime – Widget development is the latest in the long line of technologies that promise light at the end of the tunnel. But with the usual rush of getting to market first, lack of competitor communication, ISV one upmanship, industry alignments – it’s back to life as usual for the industry – many solutions, and a high degree of fragmentation.

However, many believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel – that even though there will be multiple solutions, there will be very select few solutions standing at the end of the fight. The high level of visibility and activity around Web Runtimes will result in a level of consolidation of solutions. That, coupled with the ease-of-development and ease-of-porting that Web Widgets offer, is what will take us to the promised land of write-once-run-almost-everywhere. 

I just returned from the O’Reilly OSCON 2009 Conference in San Jose, California and thought it worth sharing some of what happened there.

For those that may not be familiar with OSCON, it is an annual conference run by O’Reilly Media to provide participants with exposure to and opportunity to evaluate the new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software, and standards in the open source community. OSCON focuses on technology and has become one of the most important places to make open source related announcements, and to unveil projects and products.  This year was no different. 

In Tim O’Reilly’s keynote he talked about “the internet operating system” (aka Web 2.0) and the “collaboration of services” that are delivering next gen app’s. The mobile industry is leading the charge with open source and network-based services, so not a surprise that the example O’Reilly gave was a talk-to-dial phone app.  The specific example: if you’re looking for a pizza restaurant, you can speak “Pizza” into a mobile phone and the app automatically figures out what pizza places are near your current location.  It combines speech recognition and location based services in the cloud with intelligent search to provide new levels of functionality/innovation. The Internet, and mobile network become a data operating system.

It seems sometimes that we are becoming immune to the idea of different applications only working on different platforms. I supposed that we’re used to it in the gaming world where we have no expectation that a Wii game will work on an Xbox or PlayStation. However, most people (in the world) don’t own a games console and (certainly at present) don’t consider them to be an essential part of everyday life as they do with a mobile phone. A mobile phone really is a different gadget to most others. It is difficult to name a single object that is both aimed at business and consumers, can be used at home and on holiday, in a car, a bus or a train, that provides entertainment and communications, takes pictures and video and seamlessly moves between each of these. It also fits in your pocket and comes in a range of colours! 

But the provision of these services comes at a price to the software developers. If they want a new entertainment service to work on different phones, they must spend considerable time and effort in re-development, tailoring the application for the new platform, APIs and variations which have become inherent in the multiple platforms and JAVA implementations available. 

We've just completed another analysis of open source projects looking at licensing trends. Our most recent results on license adoption indicate a new pragmatism in the open source community, as evidenced by increasing diversity in license types being chosen for open source projects.

Most notable was the increasing adoption of the GPLv3 license coupled with an overall five percent drop in the number of projects adopting the GPL license generally.

Developers are demonstrating renewed pragmatism as evidenced by the changing mix of license choices.  This underscores the broader adoption and value of open source in today’s multi-source development environments.

The top 10 open source licenses in use are:

To listen to a podcast discussion of open source licensing trends with Tim Yeaton, CEO of Black Duck Software, click here.