Developments and enclosures in open source mobile
What’s often missed in open source discussions is how open source licenses tell only half the story. The governance model, the implicit rules defining transparency and influence into an open source project, is the small print that determines the power dynamics around that project.
The March Issue of OSBR, the excellent Canadian “Open Source Business Resource” monthly, is dedicated to mobile and the role of open source in it.
Amongst the articles:
1. Open Source Enclosures in the Mobile Space
* In, Open is the New Closed: How the Mobile Industry uses Open Source to Further Commercial Agendas, Andreas Constantinou discusses the importance of governance models to understand the dynamics of an open source product, constrasting it to the better understood role of licences. Using the mobile industry as an example, he demonstrates how governance models can be used by open source sponsors to control the development of open source products.
The article gives clear insight in the power dynamics that detract the use of open source from its original aim:
“In practice, mobile open source initiatives use a variety of control points – such as trademarks, private lines, distribution of derivatives, ownership of reviewers, gravity of contributions and contributor agreements – to turn an egalitarian governance model into an authoritarian one. Such control points can detract the very freedoms that open source licenses are meant to bestow.”
2. The State of Free Software in Mobile Devices
* In The State of Free Software in Mobile Devices, Bradley M. Kuhn reviews the state of the art of free software in mobile telephony.
He writes and concludes:
- “Based on this analysis, it appears that the HTC Dream currently gives the most software freedom based on the Android/Linux platform. It is unlikely that Google wants anything besides their applications to be proprietary. While Google has been unresponsive when asked why these hardware interface libraries are proprietary, it is likely that HTC, the hardware maker with whom Google contracted, insisted that these components remain proprietary.”
- “A community-oriented Android/Linux fork has more hope. Google has little to lose by encouraging and even assisting with such forks as its goals include wider adoption of platforms that allow deployment of Google’s proprietary applications. Operating system software-freedom-motivated efforts will be met with more support from Google than from Nokia and/or Intel.”
- “I must also mention the FreeRunner device and OpenMoko. This was a noble experiment: a freely specified hardware platform running 100% F/LOSS. I used an OpenMoko FreeRunner myself, hoping that it would be the mobile phone our community could rally around. I do think the device and its software stack has a future as an experimental, hobbyist device. But, just as GNU/Linux needed to focus on x86 hardware to succeed, so must software freedom efforts in mobile systems focus on mass-market, widely used, and widely available hardware.”