Mobile 2.0 Europe Conference

This guest post is written by Andreas Constantinou, Research Director at VisionMobile, an analyst firm focusing on mobile software strategy and open source. Andreas has followed the mobile business from the dark ages of 2000 to the openness renaissance of today. He will be part of the panel on Openness next Friday at Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona.

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On June 19th we ‘ll be discussing ‘openness’ at Mobile 2.0. As part of the Openness panel I ‘ll be joined by  Matthaus Krzykowski (VentureBeat), Pat Phelan (MAXroam), Christian Sejersen (Mozilla), David Wood (Symbian Foundation) and Jacob Lehrbaum (Sun). Clearly a discussion to look forward to.

Openess is a much-misunderstood word; a kind of good-will moniker to which people attach an impressive variety of definitions; open source, open standards, open handsets, openness as in transparency, shared roadmaps, open APIs, open route to market.. It’s a very forgiving term as far as definitions go.

One of the industry’s favourite facets of openness is of course open source. We ‘ve been giving open source a lot of thought at VisionMobile, especially as people expect us analysts to be wearing a critical and not a tinted pair of spectacles when it comes cutting through vendor hype.

Lots of software vendors and consortia have embraced open source in some form or other; Symbian Foundation, LiMo Foundation, OHA/Android, Nokia Qt, WebKit, Funambol and Sun’s Java are the ones that have hit the limelight.

Open source licensed software carries four basic freedoms; the right to access (source code), modify, distribute and contribute to the software. These freedoms have been embodied in the key licenses – GPL, LGPL, APL, EPL, MPL, BSD and MIT – which are used in the vast majority of open source projects. The licenses in turn determine the rights and obligations that use of the source code carries. Unsurprisingly, strong copyleft licenses (read: GPL) are rarely used in mobile products, due to the OEM concerns for downstream liabilities.

But what’s often missed in open source discussions is how open source licenses tell only half the story.

Licenses typically govern control of the source code. But in mobile industry, source code and products are two very different things. For example; while you can play with Android source code to your heart’s content, are the latest code check-ins publically visible ? You can peak at Symbian Foundations’ EPL-licensed source code, but who arbitrates what changes go into the UI layers of S60? You can buy a LiMo-compliant handset, but as a LiMo member can you expect LiMo handsets to ship with your source code contributions ? You can create your own WebKit-based browser, but what are the requirements for contributing source code mods to the WebKit root ?

It turns out there’s often no official answer to these questions, and when there is, the answer is a resounding No. Indeed, there are 10s of questions you could be asking to these ‘open’ projects or products, and none of these is within the bounds of the open source software license; they are in the small print or what’s known as the governance model.

The picture that emerges is one where :
- open source licenses (the large print that covers source control) are widely used, converged and well understood, while
- governance models (the small print that governs product control) are proprietary, diverging and poorly understood

Indeed, this is one of the most understated topics in the ‘open’ mobile industry today, yet one of the most fundamental in the direction where the industry will be taking. Openness is the new closed.

Clearly an interesting debate to be held at the forthcoming openness panel on June 19th as part of the Mobile 2.0.

Would very much welcome audience feedback and questions through this blog; we can then raise and address this during the Openness panel.

Andreas
Research Director, VisionMobile