The Check is in the Mail, Do No Evil and Other Matters of Trust

By Jason Whitmire

All will agree that mobile Linux suffers from fragmentation today, and that fragmentation
•    creates significant challenges to Linux adoption in mobile phones (lack of interoperability et. al.) 
•    presents barriers to innovation
•    increases the carrier cost to Linux terminal deployment.

For Linux to succeed in the mobile market, we need to minimize fragmentation and its resulting incompatibility.  In the early days of the PC revolution, this type of incompatibility was similarly rampant, and the Wintel monopoly provided the standard.  More importantly, the Wintel monopoly created the incentive to rally around the standard. 

But suggesting that the industry set up Google as the mobile Linux gatekeeper, including issuing all the keys to the various feature phone middleware/applications framework kingdoms (which account for about 90% of all phones deployed today), to take on the monumental role of software guardian for mobile Linux, is possibly antithetical to the open source movement, regardless of Google’s motto.  And perhaps this is not the role that Google ultimately seeks in the mobile market.  Indeed, there are multiple thrusts to Google’s mobile terminal strategy, all of which are underpinned by the principle of radically improving the efficiency and experience of the end-user’s mobile internet time.

That's why the market needs LIMO as well as the Open Handset Alliance. Google has the muscle to help rein in fragmentation forays from OEMs and operators, and has chosen the Android platform as they key vehicle to accomplish this ambitious goal.  At the same time,  the mobile market-based backing of LIMO is needed to keep the ‘open’ in open source.  Indeed, LIMO is building baseline technology that will be openly shared among what many Tier 1 OEMs expect to be a platform standard for the feature phone segment.  This effort could dovetail nicely with the Open Handset Alliance’s Android platform, which is attracting significant interest from application developers eager to take advantage of the Android SDK.

Might this lead to continued fragmentation, rather than unification around a mobile Linux standard?  What is needed now is for the mutual members of the two consortia to help forge the bridge between the two, so that both fulfill their technological and market roles and extend benefits to the overall mobile market. Starting with areas of complementary technology, and working toward areas of overlap until a symbiosis evolves that will benefit the entire ecosystem, this could be a convincing way to navigate today’s many waves of mobile Linux.

Jason Whitmire has more than 14 years of executive marketing and management experience in semiconductor and system software. He currently serves as General Manager of Wind River’s Mobile Solutions business. Previously he was a managing director of FSMLabs, where he headed the worldwide wireless and EMEA businesses, and he was head of business development for wireless software at Infineon Technologies for four years. Additionally, Jason has held senior product management, marketing and business development positions at two European mobile network operators. Jason got his start in the wireless arena in 1993 while representing the US government in international spectrum and privatization negotiations.