TM

www.limofoundation.org

TM

Criticality and Nuance of Governance for Mobile Handset OS

David “Lefty” SchlesingerDirector, Open Source Technologies

ACCESS Co., Ltd.Architectural Steering Committee, Open Source Committee Chair

LiMo Foundation3 March 2009

TM

3

An Important Announcement!

TM

4

An Important Announcement!You Have Just

Suffered a Failure of Governance.

TM

5

An Important Announcement!You Have Just

Suffered a Failure of Governance.

Sorry For The Inconvenience.

TM

In the News! Symbian and Android Bicker Over Who’s More “Open”!

• “Android is not open. It's a marketing label. It's controlled by Google.”—Lee Williams, Executive Director, Symbian Foundation

• “If you're talking about a platform and the source code isn't completely available for that platform, I would say it's misleading to call that platform open.”—Rich Miner, Android Architect

6

TM

In the News! Would-be iPhone Developers Perplexed and Disgruntled!

• “We spent a lot of time and money on this product. It sucks to develop an app and get it rejected for reasons that you weren't aware of.”—Patrick Alphonso, CEO, Swamiware

• “Their reasons for banning us really didn't add up… After that, they pretty much stopped talking to us or returning e-mail and voicemail.”—Sam Magdalein, Air-o-matic

7

TM

In the News! Android Doesn’t Follow Robot’s Rules of Order!

• Google Bans Its Own Developers From the Android Applications Store!

• “Memory Optimizing” Malware Frees Up Space by Deleting Your Data!

• (And It Remains to be Seen Whether You Can Give Away an iPhone in Japan!)

8

TM

9

“What we have here is a failure of governance!”

TM

Governance?

• Governance: the management of shared resources and activities so as to (hopefully) honor and respect the desires and expectations of the stakeholders.

• Two kinds of governance:– How a project (or a platform) is managed– How a platform manages its developers

• The various “open” platform choices demonstrate some significant differences

10

TM

Compare and Contrast

• iPhone: Governance by Divine Fiat– A Model Which Would Please Genghis Khan

• Android and Symbian: Governance by the Big Gorilla– Either You’re Part of the Parade, or You’re Part of the

Pavement

• OpenMoko: Governance by Benign Neglect– “Whatever, dude.”

11

TM

LiMo is Different• An internal governance model based on– Open source community “best practices”– Intellectual property “safe harbor”, representing a

collective pool of over 300,000 patents

• Significant ties with the mainstream open source community– Organizationally (GNOME Foundation, FSF-Europe, etc.),

and via direct project work (GTK+, Gstreamer, D-Bus, BlueZ, Webkit, Clutter, etc.)

12

TM

LiMo is Different• Shared fixes and optimizations ensuring

continual improvement– “Code talks”, members are equal partners, code is

effectively collectively owned and maintained

• Open Source technologies are used responsibly and responsively– LiMo Open Source policy is published on the

Foundation’s site13

TM

14

Broad and Deep Industry Engagement

( )B o a r d M e m b e r s F o u n d e r

( )B o a r d M e m b e r s C o r e

Approaching 1 Billion subscribers managed by carrier members

TM

15

+ C o r e A s s o c ia t e M e m b e r s

Broad and Deep Industry Engagement

TM

LiMo is Different for Developers, Too• Familiar development models, tools and

practices• A robust, policy-based security model• Increasing reach of the platform– More handsets, more APIs

• Moving toward an open development platform, with “consumer protection” in a phased approach 16

TM

17

Thank you!