LiMo Foundation Blog

Today, internet is a necessary tool for working, playing, accessing media and information.  It is so embedded in our life that it is easy to forget that many layers of complexity are hidden under the surface of any of the services we access every day (or shall I say every few minutes?).

15 years ago, when Opera was born, internet was not so commonly known and used as today.  Since that time, internet services and the technologies at their base have evolved dramatically.  However, it's not necessary to dig so deep in the past to find evidence of an extraordinary evolution. It's enough to think that only 5 years ago internet was very different from what it now.

In the last 5 years, the number of web sites has swelled from 43 to 144 million, and the number of users has more than doubled, from 600 million to 1.4 billion. The internet itself mutated from being, mostly, a "read only" type of media into a much more interactive experience that includes social networking, user generated content, multimedia online games, shared workspace, and online applications.

This evolution not only happened in a relatively short time, but also in a painless way (at least for the end users). The technology behind the services evolved seamlessly, with relatively little fragmentation and incompatibility between different systems. Web browser companies and standardization bodies (e.g. W3C) have had an instrumental role in ensuring interoperability.

Now, internet is moving into new territories and becoming a ubiquitous presence is our life: we can access it from our PC as well as from our mobile, car, STB, TV, game console, etc.  In order to deliver the best experience to the end-users on such devices, Internet services will need to access device capability.

This poses a huge challenge, especially when entering a highly fragmented market as the mobile phone market with its hundreds of incompatible operating systems, many different versions of runtime execution environments (e.g. Java) etc.

It has been interesting to read the initial contributions from LiMo’s bloggers – a number of subjects and perspectives have been covered from LiMo members as well as from my colleagues in the LiMo Foundation office.  A common theme seems to be around collaboration, which is something important to LiMo participants and to other stakeholders in the mobile industry who are working on open handset platforms. 

When looking at collaboration, however, it’s worth asking – what makes collaboration possible?  What are the incentives?  How is it enabled?

Application collaboration in the mobile industry reflects current technical and social trends towards openness – most recently epitomized through web 2.0 applications and social media services.  Look no further than the borders of this blog (or to one of the syndicated sites) to see how open technologies and ‘mash-ups’ are changing the ways that people communicate and transact with one another.  But collaboration on underlying infrastructure is a much more complex and nuanced activity.

I would suggest that platform collaboration is primarily driven by necessity and opportunity.  If you look outside the mobile industry you can find several examples where collaboration is done because the costs or risks of non-collaborative development would make the endeavor cost-prohibitive or otherwise unsustainable.  Two examples would be joint exploration for natural resources by energy companies; or, on a more galactic scale – the International Space Station.  Neither would be economically viable or sustainable for a single entity to drive, but all participants in these projects stand to gain by leveraging the final infrastructure that is established through their collective efforts.

In a nutshell: A key player in Open Source mobile software, ACCESS brings the Internet to mobile devices by  providing  technology, software products and platforms for Web browsing on a variety of mobile devices.

Claim to Fame: ACCESS architected Japan's groundbreaking i-mode^TM system -- the first and still the most advanced, mobile information architecture in the world.  ACCESS' NetFront Browser is also the most widely-deployed mobile browser in the world (732 million deployments on more than 1,710 different device models as of January of 2009).

What’s next:  ACCESS Linux Platform mini - a compact, commercial-grade Linux platform designed for cost-efficient mobile and next generation Internet-enabled devices with resource-constrained requirements.

ACCESS and Open Source:   ACCESS is a member of the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board and a founding member of the GNOME Mobile initiative. ACCESS engineers have directly participated in and contributed to open source projects such as GTK+, BlueZ, clutter and Eclipse.

ACCESS and the Industry:  ACCESS' past contributions to efforts like W3C and OMTP have helped to define the Web. ACCESS is actively involved in the definition of advancing standards like DLNA and BONDI.

Quote the quote: “We have a solid record of working to bridge the gap between the corporations and organizations which benefit from open source software and the individuals and communities that are responsible for providing this software. ACCESS is proud to be a strong supporter of the Foundation's efforts."-- David "Lefty" Schlesinger, ACCESS Director of Open Source Technologies, LiMo Foundation Open Source Committee chair.

Nothing is more attractive to a company that wants to reach a wide audience then the world of the mobile application. Just looking at the global numbers of devices that can access mobile application data will make a service provider drool uncontrollably. But once, one gets past the high level numbers one comes to understand exactly what the actual cost of trying to reach those global numbers are.  

The truth of the current field is that the mobile application world is a world of tiny islands fraught with fragmentation.  

The mobile world has forever been a series of worlds made up of islands (and not very big ones at that). There is the device maker world that evolved out of a hardware mindset in which almost every device is an island and even on those islands there are great variations due to the influence of the operator world. The operator world is made up of islands that evolved out of companies built to put up networks and install and run great big boxes where voice was once king. Now both the device makers and the operators are moving into the software world where giants like Microsoft and Google are battling for control.

Whilst LiMo is not an open source organisation, we firmly believe in the value of open source code, the open development model, and the importance of working with open source communities. That's the commercial spiel - how does it work in practise? 

Obviously, we use a lot of open source code within the Foundation Platform. As Gartner said, "You can try to avoid open source, but it's probably easier to get out of the IT business altogether. By 2011, at least 80% of commercial software will contain significant amounts of open source code." This raises challenges for us - we need to make sure that we keep track of our code, abide by the terms of the open source licenses, and just as importantly for us, ensure a reciprocal flow of innovation and guarantee that our modifications make it back into the open source projects and communities. We have a three-pronged approach to this. 

Firstly, we have an Open Source policy and internal guidelines that require our members to identify modifications in any open source code we use in our platform. A lot of open source licenses require this anyway, but for us it's important to make sure we do it across the board. We aim to list these modifications on our open source website (http://opensource.limofoundation.org), and we're working with our members to ensure they are contributed back to the relevant open source projects and communities. 

Secondly, from the compliance side, we're using Black Duck's Protex extensively to review license interactions and to identify any modifications. This allows us to build up a comprehensive bill of materials for our platform, and to understand the complete picture regarding proprietary, Foundation and open source code. With such a large and complex organisation of more than 50 members wanting to contribute, this centralised overview is essential. 

Finally, we're working to get our members more directly engaged with the Open Source communities themselves. We know that direct developer-to-developer communication is critical to mutual understanding, to helping to shape open source project roadmaps to take into account mobile development requirements, and making the valuable innovation within LiMo available to the open source world. I hope you'll be seeing more of us and our members at open source events in the future! 

Over the past decade, the Japanese mobile market has served as a trend setter for the mobile industry worldwide. Japanese mobile phones are renowned for being high-spec devices, although many of the specs currently set forth  functions specific to the Japanese market, such as embedding a credit or debit card, enabling a fingerprint reader, etc. 

The industry in Japan is often referred to as the “Galapagos Islands” in the mobile world for its closed mobile phone infrastructure, which has developed in its own way, disconnected from other countries.  The truth is that many handset makers in Japan also manufacture home electronics and PCs and therefore, can bring "added value" by applying their cross-industry know-how to the mobile phones they build. 

Although that "added value" has been unique and rendered the so-called “Galapagos Island” effect, i-mode was actually the first mobile platform to introduce true open access to the world. i-mode's success has been in part supported by the fact that it is marketed with an emphasis on services and the overall user experience. Today, i-mode still generates the highest ARPU in the world. 

However, Japan has its weaknesses; for instance, new phones in storefronts are only mockups. TV Commercials are mostly about pricing plans and hardware looks. By focusing on the strengths of the iPhone's in-house production and demonstrating the importance of the App Store user Interface and associated middleware, Apple is taking a different path for growth. 

I believe that the iPhone's competitive advantage is the usability of its App Store. However, I would disagree that the iPhone provides the best user interface possible on a mobile device.  I also highly doubt that iPhone will exceed i-mode’s ARPU anytime soon. 

One of the main challenges in the mobile market today is to deliver maximum software performance, function, and form that leverage every handset's actual hardware capability. A new breed of innovative Japanese companies is endeavoring to break down the walls between the developers of the phone, lower the market entry barriers in order to offer the best usability, appearance, convenience, efficiency, and standout performances worldwide based on experiences gained from the Japanese market.  

After all, among all consumer electronics products, the mobile phone is the most personal of all devices. UIs alone will not win user acceptance and subsequent marketability.

While it is clear that the mobile world is following the way paved by the LiMo Foundation in terms of openness, sharing and collaboration around middleware software, we need to prepare ourselves to face the next challenge: fragmentation.  

The licenses under which code is distributed will play an active role in managing such fragmentation to ensure, depending on the license, that modifications are made available. However, not all open source licenses are copylefted, that is, they do not include an obligation for the sharing of modifications – an example being Apache. This means that a company can fragment without sharing its own modifications. Fragmentation per se is not wrong as it often generates innovation. Nevertheless, it is essential that such innovation be shared with all so that it can be evaluated and the best innovation can be selected and adopted.  

Copylefted licenses are obviously helping to ensure the availability of code; the question is whether it is made accessible early enough to manage fragmentation in the mobile world. The obligation to share source code of modifications is triggered by distribution, in other words, by the commercialization of a device, that is, at a very late stage. Furthermore, licenses do not facilitate the management of such modifications, so that organizations have to set up a process for making decisions with regards to the adoption of modifications as part of their platform.  

The launch of the LiMo Foundation blog marks an exciting phase in LiMo’s growth and development.  In just over two years LiMo has grown from six founding companies to now include dozens of members who are actively contributing to and innovating upon the LiMo Platform.

Since LiMo’s launch, the industry debate around openness and collaboration has irreversibly shifted from the merit of those concepts, to healthy dialogue about strategies and implementation.  LiMo plans to continue leading this conversation and looks forward to getting feedback and interaction from the broader mobile industry through this blog, in addition to ongoing engagement at industry events and forums.