Getting from here to there
August 19 2008 - 1:47 pm ET | Morgan Gillis, executive director, LiMo Foundation |
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Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
The mobile communications industry is turning the page on its history of proprietary, closed development. Today, mobile is writing its next chapter, and here’s where open development is moving the story:
--4 billion mobile subscribers by 2010, according to the GSMA (Groupe Spéciale Mobile Association);
--The mobile device as your one-stop shop for communications, entertainment and work;
--The rise of the multimedia handset, user-generated content, social networking and location-based services.
In other words, a second cellular revolution has commenced.
Mobile industry leaders — now in broad accord that operating-system defragmentation is necessary to unlock handset and service innovation — are investing heavily in a variety of open-development efforts. These efforts share similar aims and participants but sometimes offer strikingly different interpretations and implementations of open development. The way forward is a model that is able to reconcile cooperation and competition by pairing open-source development principles with governance structures that respect real-world business requirements.
Closed shut
The mobile communications industry has advanced itself thus far through closed development, which is not uncommon for industries in their infancy stage.
Most mobile devices and services have been operator-specific, i.e. tailored to the unique environments of particular mobile operators. This resulted in dozens of proprietary operating systems (OSs), rendering application development across different handsets and networks both tedious and costly and, in turn, hindering innovation and market growth.
The industry has now realized that, in order to provide demanding customers with a more compelling and differentiated next-generation mobile experience, unification is required around two or three global platforms. Furthermore, the industry has seen, this coalescence is more likely to be achieved using open-source principles.
One such initiative — inspired by the open-source principles of code sharing and governance — is the Collaborative Source Development Model, whereby device manufacturers, network operators, chipset manufacturers, integrators and independent software vendors share in the continual improvement and stewardship of a common, neutral, enabling middleware platform. (This model, applied in the Linux world, is already helping to re-invigorate mobile Linux development.)
Open’s key underpinnings
Alongside engaging all participants across the mobile value chain and encouraging collaboration, a development model must equally protect the intellectual property (IP) of those participants. Both of these elements are integral to proactively defragmenting the mobile industry and spurring innovation, and the Collaborative Source Development Model provides for both.
The Collaborative Source Development Model takes a sophisticated, multi-layered approach to IP protection, based on a deep understanding of the mobile value system. Structures are put in place to ensure that a participant can inspect and contribute to the middleware without the risk of incurring patent action from another contributor or losing control over its own innovations. This approach is commonly referred to as an “IP safe harbour.”
Mutual patent and copyright non-assertion is critical as it enables contributions to be made safely to the common platform and costs for fixes and optimizations to be shared by all participants. It is important that the IP safe harbour be broad and strong, encompassing all the participants in the development effort — not just the commercial interests of a few dominant players.
However, managing the integrity of a platform within an open development environment can be quite challenging. The absence of a strict compliance program can result in the “forking” of the platform. Thus, a piece of software developed for one fork of the platform would have to be recoded for another fork of the same platform, driving OS fragmentation; in other words, this would mean going back to square one! The Collaborative Source Development Model uses a well-designed compliance program to control distribution and implementation of the core elements of the platform, to foster unification.
Conclusion
Hence, in order to be successful, it is essential that any open development model encompass the principles of equal and balanced collaboration, IP protection and implementation compliance. The Collaborative Source Development Model endeavours to meet all these requirements and beyond to open the floodgates to innovation.
Morgan Gillis is executive director of LiMo Foundation (http://www.limofoundation.org), the non-profit industry consortium dedicated to creating the first truly open, hardware-independent, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. Write to Morgan at execdirector@limofoundation.org. Write to RCR Wireless News at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
