Open Platforms and the Mobile Market

Watching progress over the last year on mobile devices, the importance of providing a truly open source platform has become increasingly clear. Opening up the development of a platform unleashes is an incredible amount of development resources that can go into making devices more powerful, and it comes at a very low cost.

The strength of a world wide group of developers joining forces on a common project is old news to the open source community with substantial success of the Linux operating system holding substantial market share against commercial operating systems. Beyond operating systems, many open source applications have been developed around the GNU public license. For example, sites such as http://sourceforge.net/ contain thousands of applications available for free download.

What is different about recent activity is the speed at which the open source movement is impacting the the mobile device market. Proprietary operating systems have long held control of mobile devices because of the lack of common architecture for these devices. The operating system for Palm devices for example could not be used on Nokia, RIM, or Motorola phones, and consequently applications were for the most part available only on a single platform.

There was some progress on porting Linux to various phone platforms prior to 2008, but wide spread open source development kicked into high gear when Google opened up development of the Android platform. It was less than a year from the November 2007 press release for Android, Industry Leaders Announce Open Platform for Mobile Devices, until sales of the G1 phone were announced by a carrier: The first Android-Powered phone. Over the intervening year, I tracked the volume of postings on the android development site. At the group site, over 1800 postings are recorded from over 3000 members. I saw a flurry of activity last spring, with 10-20 postings every day which foretold the success of Android. During 2008, many more jumped on the open source platform. Here are a few of the notable announcements.

June 10, iPhone Applications (as close as Apple can get so far!)
June 24, 2008: Nokia takes Symbian Open Source
July 28th, TI and Digikey announce Beagle Board
January 2009 Consumer Electronics Show: Palm needs Nova to shine
We are still waiting to hear from RIM: RIM says open source Blackberry unlikely

Expect to hear a slew of new announcements and continuing inroads for open source operating systems and application s for mobile devices in 2009!

Cameron Fisher, CEO Mobile Semiconductor

This entry was posted on 6. January 2009 at 08:04 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.