Roberto Galoppini's
Commercial Open Source Software

Few months ago Volantis announced that was about to release its Mobility Server Community Edition to the open source community under the GNU General Public License version 3, starting making it available immediately as a free download under a proprietary license.

On the 19th of March Volantis released the Mobility Server, opening 1.2 million lines of code, the result of seven years’ of development as reported by the press release.

What is Volantis Mobility Server Community Edition?

The Community edition includes the Volantis Multi-Channel Server (MCS), Volantis Message Preparation Server (MPS) and Volantis Media Access Proxy (MAP), as well as a significant proportion of the Volantis Device Database and Eclipse-based developer tools.

Reading the Volantis Mobility Server Overview I understand that to get full access to the Volantis Device Database you need to buy the Professional Edition. Moreover if you want to use the Device Database directly with other commercial applications that are not using Mobility Server for rendering, the Device Database edition is required.

Volantis making available Device database updates from time to time has little chance to get voluntary contributions among individual developers (as seen with WURFL or Funambol), and it is probably targeting a different audience:

Telefonica has a strong desire to work with open source projects which is why we created the OpenMovilForum project. It’s also why we fully support the idea that Volantis develops its own open source initiative.
(Luis Almansa, Senior Project Manager at Telefonica)

Andrea Trasatti, Director of Device Initiatives at dotMobi and WURFL cofounder, kept me in the loop about the news he appears to be interested in. After reading the table comparing the Community edition and the Professional one I am convinced that dotMobi can’t take advantage of the open source one. I see consultants like Nick Lane being happy with the Community edition, as probably are happy SMEs that couldn’t afford the proprietary version to fulfill their own private needs.

Also Small IT firms can now step into this market, and I suggest Mark to consider to get the Mobility Server listed in the Ohloh open source directory.

Volantis primary aim seems to be setting industry standards, though. The company has results also from the press release has  contributed to a community standards process to create within , driven by the W3C the DIAL specification. As a matter of fact XDIME, a Web development markup language, has been created by Volantis to comply with the DIAL specification and is designed to create content viewable on any mobile device.

Am I looking forward to speak again with Mark Watson, Volantis Systems CEO and sort out more first hand information.

Technorati Tags: open source mobile, funambol, wurfl, andreatrasatti, markwatson, volantis, DIAL, telefonica, openmovilforum

Ten challenges and priorities for free and open source in 2008 - Bob Sutor (via Raven Zachary) set his priorities. In my opinion both IBM and Microsoft are not addressing the real issue behind open standards: we urge to establish a certification body, on duty to certify standards compliance.

Italian Open Source funds: the open letter - My buddy Flavia Marzano posted on our letter to the Minister for the Innovation in the Public Administration Luigi Nicolais, maybe I’ll get a chance to give him the letter at the QualiPSo conference, in Rome.

The Implication of Microsoft’s Open Source like Strategy for Software Developers -  Next March on the 12th I’ll give a speech at OSIM USA - The World’s Largest Forum for Mobile Linux and Open Source - talking of Microsoft’s strategy and vision on open source. Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: Open Source Funds, Italian politicians, oss, open business, OSIM, Microsoft, IBM, BobSutor, RavenZachary, QualiPSo, egovernment

On monday Free Software Foundation published the GNU Affero GPL v3, a modified version of the General Pubic License v3. Differently from the GPL, the Affero license is aimed at ensuring cooperation with the community in the case of network server software.

As a matter of fact the General Public License permits making a modified version and letting the public access it on a server without ever releasing its source code to the public. The Affero license instead add a requirement that if the software is used on a public server, users must be able to get the source code.

I want you! by Sunbound

I asked Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol CEO - who formerly addressed the “GPL loophole” creating a new license - to comment the Affero version 3. I was late, he already posted on the subject, announcing Funambol’s decision to go with the AGPL.

Well done Fabrizio, great move! As a matter of fact you are the first. I am afraid you are not going to win your bet with Mark Radicliffe: AGPL is not going to become more popular than GPL in the next five years.

While I believe the AGPL is not going to be Google’s worst nightmare, and is not specifically designed for Web Services, I hope you consider taking actively part against the GPL loophole, now!

Related posts:

Closing open source loopholes
FSF releases license for network-distributed software
A new GPL for software as a service
FSF finalizes GPL-based license for Web services

Technorati Tags: Affero, Affero GPL, GPL, Licensing, Funambol

While at the Future of Mobile, the event organised by Carsonified Systems last week in London, I enjoyed very much Tony Fish’s key-note speech.

I asked Tony to pass me over his presentation in order to write an article for an Italian magazine, and here I am reporting just some of his notes regarding Digital Footprint.

Enjoy also his full presentation.

Footprints: Like Neil Armstrong we all leave footprints. 2.0 has a fascination with this data, in web 2.0 language ‘the next intel inside.’ I don’t associate footprints with identity. Footprints are about where we have been, for low long, how often and the inter-relationships.

Therefore Digital Footprint is not identity, your passport, bank account or social security number. Digital Footprints come from mobile, web and TV – the digital data and metadata of who we are, the true value and why the ownership of this data is the battle ground to be won and lost, the reason why Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google wakes up thinking mobile before he looks at his email or worries about the value of double click or improving a search algorithm.

However this footprint and its digital data I contend is mine. Google gets your hands off it, but who will I trust with my digital footprint if I don’t want Google to have it. I need a trusted, open digital footprint store. Collecting, collating and serving my footprints, through an open application protocol interface across all platforms. I want to share my footprint, as this will lead to service companies improving my experience as it will become personalized. But who should I trust and what should I trust them for. To understand this we need a small diversion to chat about advertising, as this is a model to justify your views and assertions.

Advertising started with the age of assertion, “washing powder washes whiter than white”. It moved to the second phase of engagement, comparison and involvement – “look what your neighbour uses.” The current phase is about attitude – “Dirt is Good”, but advertising in what-ever shape or form requires channels and feedback, something it lacked until recently. Advertising is currently used to justify every business model, with the associated convergence or bundling issue of everything else is free. A symbiotic parasite. But the advertising to give you something for free requires an understanding of your personal data, based on your digital footprint. Therefore if I control your digital footprint, I control the advertising revenues. But as Google only controls the web footprint, control of the mobile is critical, especially when you consider Mobile adds whole new classes of unique data – location and attention.

But there is a school of thought that says if I own my digital footprint data, I could sell this to advertisers directly, but this poses the difficult question of who would store it, how it is collected, shared and protected, great topics but not for now.

I want you to consider line of sight advertising for a moment. Consider the following model. Suppose that a bill board, or a scene that it within your line of sight could be controlled by you mobile device. Advertising now becomes specific to the person looking? But how would it cope with the crowd. Would the utopia vision focus on those who are strong and marginalize the weak. The social gap becomes formed not by the technology but by those who don’t have the same opinion. We only get to listen to the voice we want – this is how you train a terrorist. As a design consideration – how about taking away the screen and then consider the uniqueness.

Indeed, where is there value, is there more value in knowing what I am doing or who I do it with. The TV can provide some data, the web probably more, but the mobile would be unique.

Therefore as you consider mobile and bring your experience - think about the context and where value is created, not why your doing it, but how others can and will extract value from it.

Technorati Tags:   TonyFish, Future of Mobile, digital identity,  

Volantis, the world’s leading supplier in the field of Mobile Content Adaptation, announced that they are going to release in open source a Volantis solution to deliver content to mobile users.

The Volantis Mobility Server - a solution enabling content providers and carriers to benefit from a ‘write once view anywhere’ content strategy - is already available for download at the community area. Open Source release, under the GPL version 3, is expected within the first quarter of 2008.

At the Future of Mobile I didn’t get a chance to meet in person people from Volantis, but yesterday I had a skype conversation with Mark Watson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Volantis Systems.

My first question to Mark was about why they are going open source.

It is difficult to write mobile applications without an application server like ours. Mobile web is not moving as fast as it should be, and Volantis by contributing with software to the market can help accelerate it.

Is Volantis expecting to get voluntary contributions from the community?

We would like that, we don’t want to necessarily depend on it. We don’t want to bet on that for our success.

While at the present stage there are no plans in place to cooperate with other open source communities, I believe that commensalistic approaches are likely to happen. Let’s wait and see if eventually the Volantis Community will develop a symbiotic approach towards open source communities, and viceversa.

As a matter of fact Volantis is the first mover in the mobile content delivery arena willing to publish its code under an open source license, and they spent time and effort to choose the appropriate license (Doug, you should also count them from now on!!).

While Volantis sounds internally organized to keep its mobile equipment database updated - and they might not run Code Sniper or Phone Sniper as does Funambol - I see other similarities with Funambol. Just as Funambol, Volantis today is basically addressing the “top” of the pyramid (the carriers), but by opening its platform, Volantis can substantially enlarge its customer base with a try&buy formula.

Last but really not the least, I believe that many small IT firms that couldn’t afford platforms like Volantis in the past can now step into this market. And maybe Mark is right in stating:

We believe that for every potential web application in the PC world, there is going to be a mobile equivalent.

My suggestion to Mark is the following: what about organising meet ups among IT firms interested in Volantis, just like the Atlassian Group?

Technorati Tags: mobile content adaptation, open source mobile, volantis

The Future of Mobile took place yesterday in London. Among speakers Luca Passani (AdMob) and Andrea Trasatti (dotMobi) of the WURFL fame, and Dave Burke (google), to talk about Android.

The event, organised by Carsonified Systems, now looking for someone to lead the Mobile event, was mostly aimed at developers and designers. Brian Fling - an apple-enthusiast - was the host of the event. The great key-note speaker Tony Fish asserted that “Digital Footprint is not identity”, with a fast and furious presentation that really impressed me.

Luca talked about WURFL and WALL news, in terms of architecture and functionalities. The point on the new WALL NG was made with screenshots: Luca rebuilt the first page of Ebay UK for mobile and showed how the user experience was great on high-end devices, while degrading gracefully on older phones. He also spoke about the upcoming web application designed to simplify the contribution process, today mail-based.
He raised the well known Vodafone issue - regarding the fact Vodafone is stripping out the essential device identification information that mobile phones send - receiving the applause of the audience. On the topic he remarked that W3C was not playing the “policeman role”, eventually arguing with a W3C representative attending the event.

Andrea Trasatti explained the dotMobi strategy, and it came out that his open source attitude is not part of his new job at dotMobi. I took my chance to ask his opinion about Volantis going open source, and he told me that all these open source efforts (W3C included) are welcome. On a commercial tone, he believes that the dotMobi device database is going to make the difference, since open source projects like WURFL could fail to keep an updated database.

But Volantis is the first (commercial) mover in this arena, and I believe that at the end of the day if their community is taking off, dotMobi might change its strategy.

David Burke, defined as “frighteningly good looking“, got straight to the point showing the audience how easy it is to deploy a simple application with Android. He was really effective, as clearly results also from Mike Butcher’s live blogging.

Talking about the Android technlogical club, David answered a set of questions about licensing and lock-down hypothesis the Android FAQ way, eventually failing to convince Mike:

One questioner asked if Google would be subject to anti-trust allegations given that a lot of Google applications will come default with the handsets, but Burke gave the impression that this would be unlikely as handset makers could “swap out applications.” We’ll see I guess.

So what’s the upshot of all this? In terms of content perhaps not a great deal. If one were to be cynical, one would say that this was mainly about a Google guy appearing in London (which has a big mobile community) at a conference aimed at mobile developers, and was in hiring mode…

As a matter of fact the technological club behind the Open Handset Alliance seems unwilling to disclose the platform until they have eventually got their first mobile equipments on the shelf. For that we have to wait one year. A result that could be obtained also with a “deffered” GPLv2/v3. Apparently the club likes the apache license more, a risky bet considering OEM’s hystorical attitude to proprietarize the “commons”. See the “successful” Symbian fragmentation.

I really hope Google makes it work, but lock-down strategies are enabled by not copyleft licenses, and this market has greatly proven to be unable to share any sort of standard, despite everyone yesterday spoke about that. And yes, I agree, “the Future of Mobile is not in the hands of Planet Mobile anymore“!

Technorati Tags: Android, FOM, AndreaTrasatti, LucaPassani, WURFL, Volantis, Open Source Strategy

Yesterday a broad alliance of leading technology and wireless companies announced the collaborative development of Android, the new open platform for mobile phones by Google.

The Open Handset Alliance, that’s the name of the most promising technological club after the GSM MoU club agreement, lists already 34 members. Among them names like Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Nvidia, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, NTT DoCoMo, LG Electronics and HTC.

Great expectations, by deVos

From the press release:

This alliance shares a common goal of fostering innovation on mobile devices and giving consumers a far better user experience than much of what is available on today’s mobile platforms. By providing developers a new level of openness that enables them to work more collaboratively, Android will accelerate the pace at which new and compelling mobile services are made available to consumers.

So Google is not interested in making money on software (like Microsoft), or hardware (like Apple). As usual they want to make their money on services. As reported by Wireless, according to Opus Research, mobile advertising spending in North America and Western Europe will reach a combined US$5.08 billion by 2012, up from an estimated $106.8 million at the end of this year.

The Open Handset Alliance describes itself as “the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices” aiming to develop technologies that will cut the cost of developing and distributing mobile devices and services. But Google knows very well that mobile innovation basically has been hampered by “device fragmentation“, and android is the ultimate answer to this specific issue.

Despite Android’s license (apache 2.0) enable providers to create a locked-down phone, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, said:

It’s both possible and highly unlikely because the more constraints the manufacturers put on the platform the less beneficial it is.While a license would allow that kind of behavior … it’s unlikely you’ll see [a locked down] scenario.

Is he right? Let’s see what happened before.

Lessons from the ‘past’:the Symbian case

The Symbian promise was aimed at a similar goal, when it was established in UK as a private independent company in June 1998. The original shareholders were Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia In October 2003 Motorola withdrew from Symbian as a shareholder by selling is stake to Nokia and Psion, becoming a simple licensee.

I had doubts on the Symbian technological club since early 2003, as I wrote in an article. The idea was good, but the implementation was quite poor, since even the most important shareholders were adopting incompatible Symbian’s dialects.

While I agree with Savio Rodrigues saying that is a very pragmatic decision, I believe that platform differentiation is a two fold process of securing individual vendors’ businesses and at the same time prevent lock down scenarios.

Related posts from other sources:

Google’s big mobile splash: Handicapping the winners and losers - Larry Dignan describes how Google’s move could reshape the wireless industry

Google phone won’t pry open wireless business model - Dana Blankenhorn colors himself as skeptical thinking to the North-American duopoly

Getting all warm and Googley over open source - Alec Saunders puts Google among what he calls “strategic open source” firms.

Reinventing the Linux phone, Google-style -  Matthew Aslett compares the different open source mobile initiatives.

Technorati Tags: Open Source Mobile, Google strategy, android, technological clubs, symbian , SavioRodrigues, EricSchmidt

The open source GPE project yesterday announced a new project to create a fully open source software stack for mobiles, named GPE Phone Edition.

GPE Phone Edition is a fully open source project based on developments from the GPE project adding necessary components for mobile phone usage. Based on standards defined by the LiPS Forum a complete application software stack is built. The current implementation is based on code contributed to the LiPS Forum by Orange/France Telecom’s research and development lab located in Beijing China in collaboration with GPE project members.

Key features of the current implementation are:

• application development and runtime framework
  .
• voice call framework and application
  .
• mobile phone suitable PIM application such as addressbook and calendar
  .
• SMS messaging framework and application
  .
• instant messaging framework and application
  .
• multi media playback framework and applications

The project provides all relevant sourcecode through the service of LinuxToGo, an open source collaboration site dedicated to mobile Linux developments.

The sourcecode is accompanied by a demonstration environment built using the popular Open Embedded build system. It can be run as a VMware virtual machine providing almost full mobile phone features if connected to a mobile phone’s modem. The project now calls for hardware manufacturers to open their devices so that the software stack can be adopted to a wide variety of mobile phones.

Two days ago I got distracted by the Apple’s announcement, while already exists an Open Mobile Communications development platform named OpenMoko, announced by the Open Source in Mobile Conference, held in Amsterdam’s on the 7th of November 2006. OpenMoko is a spin-off of Taiwanese computer First International Computer.

As observed the concept of the mobile phone NEO1973, likely to be the first 640×480 screen phone available in the U.S., is based on OpenMoko, and it’s quite similar to the iPhone, where the latter is more stylish.

OpenMoko is based on 2.6 Kernel, has layered an application framework, interface layer, and a few basic programs (dialer, address book, and message application).

The application framework and the application manager are the key, as Moss-Pultz, OpenMoko head, explained 3,500 applications could be adapted.

Developers are warmly invited to participate:

Whoever writes the most popular application gets a free phone, that sort of thing.

OpenMoko plans to make money by certifying applications, but users might choose to get them from uncertified communities’ applications.
At the international CES, held in Las Vegas from the 8th of January till the 11th, developers large and small have come together bringing thousands of open source applications to the mobile phone, read the full story.

Steve Jobs eventually unveiled the iPhone mobile device. I believe he is right saying:

Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

The iPhone runs on OS X, and it’s supposed to easily synchronize with Mac tools like iTunes libraries, email, calendar and Safari’s bookmarks.