There's been a flurry of excitement about open source in the mobile world in the past few weeks, what with Google's Open Handset Alliance and its associated Android software platform. In all the hype (some deserved, some not), people seem to have forgotten one Very Big Problem in mobile:
There is a huge array of different hardware and software specifications.
Google's Android solves the software specification problem (at least, for those phones that end up using it), but it does nothing to resolve the wider compatibility problem for mobile developers. Developing for the Android platform may make sense five years from now, but it's a losing (market) proposition until it gains widespread adoption.
Which is why Volantis' decision to open source its framework is such a positive thing for the mobile world:
... Read moreThere are so many good (and bad) things to say about Google's decision to open up the mobile market with an open-source mobile software platform that I'll just let others do the talking:
Sergey Brin (via OpenDotDot):
As I look at it I reflect, ten years ago I was sitting at a graduate student cubicle. We were able to build incredible things. There was a set of tools that allowed us to do that. It was all open technologies. It was based on Linux, GNU, Apache. All those pieces and many more allowed us to do great things and distribute it to the world. That is what we are doing today, to allow people to innovate on today's mobile devices. Today's mobile devices are more powerful than those computers I was working on just ten years ago. I cannot wait to see what today's innovators will build.
And they will all build on open-source technologies, just as Google has. Why? Because reinventing the platform wheels, piece by piece, vendor by vendor, is inane and inefficient.
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