The economics of innovationin mobile technologies

Transfer Summit, Oxford, 25 June 2010

twitter @savs

asavory@apache.org

andrew.savory@limofoundation.org

http://www.andrewsavory.com/blog/

Hi, I’m Andrew.

economics

innovation

mobile technologies

The dim & distant past

19982002 2006

2005 2007

1983

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The future

Investment

Value Creation

We are here

The present

Reduced cost ofacquisition of software

Reduced cost ofaccess to innovation

Reduced cost ofownership of

software

3 Mobile OSS Economic Drivers

GeoClue

... collaboration with OSS projects for maintenance of community software ...

... reduced cost of ownership ...

Maintenance is the biggest cost in the TCO of Community Open Source Software

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ForkingUpstream open source

Internal “fork”

Product code

=

FAIL

S/W£10.5m

1™ White Paper

Mobile Open Source Economic Analysis

LiMo Foundation White PaperAugust 2009

™

Where an open mobile platform is already using key

open source projects of critical importance, there is direct economic value in

constructive engagement with the corresponding open

source communities.

blog.limofoundation.org/index.php/LiMo-Foundation/Mining-of-Open-Source-Code-to-Understand-the-Economics-of-Using-Open-Source-Within-Mobile.html

www.google.com/search?q=limo+blog+mal+economic+analysis

Upstream open source

Internal “fork”

Product code

“unleveraged potential”

Maintenance is the biggest cost in the TCO of Community Open Source Software...

contributeupstream

mergedownstream

Merge Never

Merge Late Contribute Late

Merge Early Contribute Later

Merge Early Contribute Early

$40m / 283 FTEs per year

$20m / 141 FTEs per year

$10m / 70 FTEs per year

$8.3m / 24 FTEs per year

Product development cycle approx 2 years

Cost of upstream resync

Time

Community open source development codeline

Software selection decision made at this point

Resync (merge) with upstream

MLCL

MECL

MN

With ME, the vendor’s internal dev branch is OSS

MECE Contribute upstream later

Product shipment made at this point

Closer integration with upstream innovation

Greater sophistication required to manage integration activity

Working with open source is a sophisticated supply chain management problem ...

... not rocket science.

(benevolent) dictator

technical steering group

committers

contributing developers

contributing users

users

evaluators

Meritocracy

Increasinginvolvement

The future

source: VisionMobilewww.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/06/lead-innovate-or-assemble-how-software-is-changing-the-macro-economics-of-mobile-handsets-2/

“the evolution of software has been anything but linear in the last two years; Google’s Android, an operating system that was greeted with skepticism in 2008 become a launchpad for just about everyone working within the mobile industry.”

Convergence

Platforms

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nielsvk/258859545/

Developers

Thank you!