A to z of open mobile

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Wednesday, 25 February 2009 1

This presentation was for the Cambridge Wireless “Open Source - free lunch?” Software SIG
event on 25th February 2009. The event aimed to explore the world of mobile open source
software development and to challenge the arising issues from this debate.


This presentation is a lightning-fast look at the mobile ecosystem, identifying key open
elements (open source, open development, open standards, open ...)

It is not comprehensive but hopefully gives an insight into the different types of openness in
mobile.


Android is the obvious big name in “Open Source mobile”. A year after announcing that they
were working on a mobile operating system, the Open Handset Alliance released the open
source code of Android to the public.

But the most notable thing about Android is that as much source as possible was released
under the Apache license, a so-called “liberal” or “business-friendly” license.

The choice of open source license for your code says a lot about what you are trying to
achieve. For example selecting the GPL shows a strong focus on freedom and liberty. In this
case, Google’s choice of ASL demonstrates a desire to be commercially-friendly (because of
the ability to use ASL code in proprietary products) and to see widespread adoption (in
contrast to the widespread sharing of code the GPL enforces).

This choice of license could well be crucial to the long-term success or otherwise of the
Android platform.

http://source.android.com/posts/opensource

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/11/why-google-chose-the-apache-software-
license-over-gplv2.ars

http://source.android.com/license


Open Source goes hand-in-hand with Open Standards.

Several network operators, concerned with fragmentation across platforms, have got together
to try to standardise the way the existing web 2.0 environment is moved onto mobile devices.
This initiative is OMTP - Open Mobile Terminal Platform. http://www.omtp.org/

The BONDI project is about a common web runtime and widget layer for devices, and
includes a set of API speciﬁcations, interface, security and architecture requirements, and a
reference implementation. http://bondi.omtp.org/

BONDI is particularly compelling and exciting because it allows developers to write mobile
applications that are indistinguishable from native applications using little more than HTML,
Javascript and CSS, with little if any cross-platform testing and integration required.

BONDI was recently endorsed by the LiMo Foundation. http://www.limofoundation.org/en/
limo-press-releases/limo-foundation-endorses-omtp-bondi-speciﬁcation-to-bring-
web-2.0-applications-to-limo-handsets-3.html

Widget screenshots borrowed from http://www.access-company.com/products/
mobile_solutions/netfrontmobile/browser/widgets.html


There are many C’s: commoditisation, copyleft, cost, compliance, collaboration, community.
Commoditisation (and consolidation): the end of vertically-integrated handset production.
There’s little value for handset manufacturers to build a complete platform on their own. The
first wave of commoditisation saw a move to using linux kernel; we’re in the second wave at
the moment, seeing a broad cross-section of the mobile ecosystem seeking shared
development opportunities at the middleware level through LiMo.
Cost: open source software represents an opportunity to significantly lower the cost of
deployment, and use of open source is “enlightened self-interest”.
Copyleft: license obligations such as making your changes available to others.
Compliance: the work of ensuring you fulfil those license obligations is essential and the
alternatives costly.


Downloading and Distribution.
Application stores for mobile. The Apple Application Store was a game-changer and
demonstrated consumers’ desire to customise their phones and buy applications over the air.
But the application store model is at odds with the FSF’s Free Software Deﬁnition from the
outset. Apple are the sole authority on what can and can’t be made available, and apps are
encumbered with DRM that prevents the freedom to redistribute copies to help your
neighbour.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/5-reasons-to-avoid-iphone-3g
http://www.fsf.org/iphone-gplv3
Dalvik is another important D. It is a virtual machine in the Android platform that runs Java
applications that have been converted into a compact Dalvik executable. It’s actually more
open than Sun’s J2ME - because Dalvik apps are not compiled into Java bytecode, there’s no
need to pay Sun a runtime license.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_virtual_machine
http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/

The ﬁnal D is D-Bus: this could be the enabling technology behind BONDI, through for
example Movial’s open source browser bridge, which provides access to low-level
functionality from the web runtime.


Ecosystems and Evolution.
Every phone platform, not just the open ones, needs a healthy developer ecosystem. A
diverse membership from many different organisations, a rich toolchain, a collaboration
environment, and source code. The more open the ecosystem, the easier it is for developers
to engage.

Having a healthy ecosystem in turn encourages evolution. In the open source world, any
developers making small incremental changes based on ﬁtness of code, encourages the best
technical solutions.


Free (libre). Four Freedoms. Free Software Foundation.
The official stewards of the free software movement, the FSF are responsible for the GNU
project (writing an operating system that is entirely open source), for the Gnu Public License,
and for defending the license, for example in a recent suit ﬁled against Cisco.

Fennec, the Firefox derivative free mobile browser initiative from Mozilla.

Funambol, open syncing.


GNOME Mobile, an initiative from the GNOME Foundation, to advance the use, development,
and commercialisation of GNOME components as a mobile and embedded user experience
platform.
It’s an important focus for work on optimising and tuning for mobile. Many recognised
industry names are participating, for example Nokia, Samsung, Access, LiMo. We could see
GNOME as ubiquitous on mobile as on the Linux desktop.

Governance - importance of clear community model in open development.

GIT - distributed version control could turn software development (including. open source) on
it’s head.
GPL - the copyleft license that 70% of open source is under.

exceptional achievement

excellent collaboration

decreasing our maintenance burden

Hildon and haptic.

Touch interfaces require new paradigms and new development of existing toolkits. Nokia
took GTK and built Hildon, the interface for their internet tablet. In a discussion on
achievements in Gnome Mobile in 2008, Luc Pionchon of Nokia said that they would not have
been able to make such an exceptional achievement as shipping the N810 using a recent
version of GTK if it was not for the excellent collaboration by the community. This has in turn
reduced their ongoing maintenance burden. Open source “enlightened self-interest” at work.

The full quote:
The exceptional achievement is that, at the origin of GNOME Mobile there was a bunch
of people blocked with GTK+2.6, because of the performance of GTK+2.8. At that time
Nokia had a dirty fork of GTK+ 2.6, and merging in improvements from trunk was a
signiﬁcant effort.
Now, thanks to excellent collaboration, we at Nokia were able to ship N810 and Maemo
4 with GTK+ 2.10. One of the important side effects is that, we were catching up with
the latest GTK+, decreasing our maintenance burden.


The Internet.
Open Source development has really accelerated thanks to the widespread adoption of the
internet. The internet is an essential enabler of distributed and open development:

- public source code repositories

- public mailing lists

- wikis and websites

- internet relay chat
The internet allows the fast distribution of both software and conversations. The internet is
also behind another sea-change: always on computing, via the mobile platform up through
MIDs and Netbooks to Laptops. It’s leading to a new breed of open social software (facebook,
google latitude, cloud computing in general).
Another I: IP, licensing


J2ME.
Java mobile edition is open source, but not much use to those following the letter of the
licenses.
Sun released their code under the GPL v2, but with an exception to the license “the classpath
exception” that makes the GPL reciprocal only for the Java platform code and not for user
code running on it.

This exception does not exist for Mobile Edition, so those wanting to ship Java on mobiles
have to pay Sun.
This makes implementing Java on phones an expensive proposition.
This also means that the TCK (conformance test suite) contains ﬁeld of use restrictions (since
open source java implementations could become open source j2me implementations).

http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/110/
http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/faq.jsp#g3


Kernel - the linux kernel. Why are so many mobile platforms using it?
The kernel goes an average of 2.7 months between releases. 2.83 patches per hour accepted
into the kernel tree. Sustained growth to the kernel of 10% a year (support for new hardware,
new features added). There are over 3000 developers from more than 270 companies
contributing to the kernel. Top companies contributing include Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Intel -
but biggest contributions are not identiﬁed as from any company (nearly 14%). Over 70% are
paid for their work on the kernel.

This is one of the largest and most successful open source projects ever, with a vibrant and
active community supported by many companies. This is an important strength upon which
mobile can build.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5b/Linux_kernel_map.png

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php


We already covered linux under “kernel”, so this is the LiMo pitch.

LiMo accelerates the mobile ecosystem. Our DNA enables equitable member collaboration in
order to facilitate the next generation of mobile handsets and applications. We enable
developer opportunity and innovation.

We pioneered the open governance model enabling joint ownership and responsibility.
We have a vast pool of IP contributions from many market-leading companies.
Our licensing model enables innovation whilst preventing platform fragmentation.
We focus on common middleware modules to support differentiation and multiple business
models.


Mobile Internet Devices and Netbooks are exciting as they represent a prominent positioning
of Linux and open platforms to the consumer.
Maemo, open platform (one vendor) with large developer / user community, predicated
around a hardware device, an internet tablet.
Moblin, driven by Intel, designed to support netbooks to MIDs, somewhat similar to LiMo in
that it provides foundation APIs above the kernel but below the UI.


Networks - what happens when we have open networks?

Neo Freerunner is a smartphone developed by the openmoko project.


Openmoko - a project aiming at creating truly open source mobile phones.
Consisting of two sub-projects: openmoko linux, and openmoko hardware.
The openmoko linux project builds the software platform.

Openmoko hardware aspire to “open source hardware”, with hardware description language
“HDL” code (semiconductor intellectual property cores) being shared. This means anyone can
implement the hardware, or improve it, and distribute the changes.

An interesting side-effect of openness is that there is an Android port to the openmoko
hardware platform.


Patents.
LiMo Foundation has a strong patent non-assert as part of membership.
How do companies with strong patent portfolios balance the shift to open source against the
need to protect their intellectual property?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ejector_seat_with_patents_crooped.jpg


QT is a cross-platform application development framework, widely used in the development
of graphical user interface programs.

It’s interesting in the world of open mobile because
- it’s now owned by Nokia, since Nokia acquired Trolltech in June 2008
- it’s cross-platform, running on X/Linux, Mac, Windows CE, embedded, series 60.
- it’s now been relicensed to LGPL.

It could therefore be the best option for cross-platform GUIs now that the license permits
more widespread use. However, it may have already lost too much ground to fragmentation
and alternate toolkits such as GTK. Watch this space.


REALITY
This graph shows smartphone platform market share.
Openness is good but what matters is innovation and cool product. For example Apple and
RIM - people don’t buy phones because they are open, they buy them because they are cool
or workhorses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone


Symbian Foundation have made the legacy S60 code open.
The real challenge is twofold: sorting out the complex network of rights issues, and building
a successful developer ecosystem.
This could be one of the largest open source projects in the world - 40m lines of code - but
it is difficult to attract open source developers to work on a large mature codebase, as
opposed to simply building applications on top of the codebase.

tom tom


TomTom
There are more types of mobile device than just phone, and TomTom is an interesting
convergence device as we start to see mobile data connections used for over the air updates
etc.

TomTom have a long track-record of using Open Source, having built their product on top of
Linux.
They resolved licence issues by hiring many of the community who criticised them - a neat
way of ensuring compliance and keeping the community happy.


Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, release shows an increasing focus on scaling out Ubuntu to
mobile devices.
An announcement in November 2008 outlined how ARM and Canonical will bring the full
Ubuntu desktop operating system to the ARMv7 processor architecture to address demand
from device manufacturers.
This is on top of commitments for Ubuntu to support Intel MIDs.

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/arm-linux
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/mobile
http://www.ace-on-tech.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/jaunty-ubuntu-jackalope.jpg


Virtuous cycle of open source.

People start using open source;
They contribute back to open source;
They become developers of open source by opening up their code;
They have others starting to use, contribute, develop their open source.


WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe) is an XML configuration file containing information
on capabilities and features of many (400+) mobile devices. While less important today, it’s
an excellent early example of convergence and collaboration, with many major handset
manufacturers and network operators contributing device profiles.

Did WebKit kill WURFL? Is WebKit en route to being the de facto web runtime standard on
mobile devices?

WindRiver - One of the most prominent integrators of mobile linux stacks.

vs


Xensource, VMWare, and the impact of virtualization on open mobile platforms.
Is it relevant? Will linux become the ‘de facto’ hardware abstraction layer?

http://www.vmware.com/technology/mobile/

http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-research/2009-01/msg00002.html

http://ostatic.com/blog/vmwares-mobile-virtualization-strategy-calls-for-open-source-
responses


“Year 2008” - according to Andreas Constantinou of Vision Mobile, it was:
“...the year when open source has transitioned from a status of early adoption to one of
acceptance and endorsement by the mobile industry’s who’s who as a recipe for collaborative
development.”

We’re now in the time of “Mobilising open source”.
Operators return to MWC armed with Open Source. The use of open source software in mobile
is exploding from the operating system all the way up to the user experience.
Mobile is now innovating on a perceived commodity.
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/01/mobilising-open-source.html
http://blogs.windriver.com/wind_river_blog/2009/01/operators-return-to-barcelona-this-
time-armed-with-open-source.html
http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2008/12/mapping-open-source-into-mobile-who-
where-and-how/


Z-Push
An open source implementation of Microsoft ActiveSync for over-the-air multiple platform
syncing to for example Windows Mobile devices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-push

Zeitgeist.

Thank you!

andrew.savory@limofoundation.org


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