LinuxInsider Talkback

Re: The Driving Force Behind the Open Source Mobile Movement
Posted by: Jason Whitmire 2009-03-27 10:00:51

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In a sagging economy, doing business as usual is rarely prudent and usually disastrous. Companies often must change the course of strategies, or in some cases accelerate them. After a spate of business meetings during the marathon that is Mobile World Congress, one takeaway is the acceleration in the mobile handset market of operators moving to open source software-based devices. Two device types are driving the increased adoption of open source software stacks: smartphones and netbooks, with many operators and OxMs also forming plans for Linux-based mobile Internet devices in the coming year.

A few thoughts
Posted by: fosslc 2009-03-27 10:21:52 In reply to: Jason Whitmire

I enjoyed the article. I note that the statistics from various sources agree in indicating Linux and open source for mobile embedded development is approximately 20% of the market and growing fast.

I feel the evidence shows the benefits are being realized for open source on netbooks/mobile embedded hardware. Steve Balmer's comments agree - see http://fosslc.org/drupal/node/345

I'm not sure I agree with your reasons for the benefits of open source not being realized. Here are a few counter points/ thoughts.

1) Open source is great for learning, and developing community/ecosystems e.g. Eclipse, Mozilla, OSGeo, Linux, Drupal. I suspect any shortage of skilled workers is temporary.

2) Agreed about licensing concerns, though with Qt's new license and other libraries - this is less of an issue. In truth, understanding your license rights and obligations is not unique to open source.

3) Testing is not a unique challenge to open source/closed source. Neither is testing for variations of a platform (think 2000, XP, Vista, etc.)

4) Is fragmentation really an issue - see http://fosslc.org/drupal/node/361

Thank you.