The mobile landscape has changed quite dramatically over the past few years, with the emergence of new mobile platforms and a significant shift toward open source in mobile technologies. What are the key economic drivers for this shift, and what are the lessons that can be learnt from the mobile industry's adoption of open source? This talk draws on Andrew's experiences as Open Source Manager for the LiMo Foundation. It looks at how and why open source has become commonplace in mobile platform development, and the advantages and pitfalls of using open source.

1. The economics of innovation
in mobile technologies
Transfer Summit, Oxford, 25 June 2010

2. Hi, I’m Andrew.
http://www.andrewsavory.com/blog/
andrew.savory@limofoundation.org
asavory@apache.org
twitter @savs

3. economics
innovation
mobile technologies

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2002 2006
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The dim & distant past

10. $
We are here
Investment
Value Creation
The future

11. The present

12. 3 Mobile OSS Economic Drivers
Reduced cost of
acquisition of software
Reduced cost of
access to
innovation
Reduced cost of
ownership of
software

14. GeoClue

15. ... reduced cost of
ownership ...
... collaboration with OSS
projects for maintenance of
community software ...

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

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20. Product code
Internal “fork”
Upstream open source
Forking

21. =
FAIL

23. S/W
£10. 5m

24. Where an open mobile
platform is already using key
open source projects of
Mobile critical importance, there is
direct economic value in
Open Source constructive engagement with
Economic Analysis the corresponding open
source communities.
LiMo Foundation White Paper
August 2009
™
™
White Paper 1
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

25. Maintenance is the
biggest cost in the TCO of
Community Open Source
Software...
Product code
Internal “fork”
Upstream open source
“unleveraged potential”

26. merge
downstream
contribute
upstream

27. Merge Never
$40m / 283 FTEs per year
Merge Late Contribute Late
$20m / 141 FTEs per year
Merge Early Contribute Later
$10m / 70 FTEs per year
Merge Early Contribute Early
$8.3m / 24 FTEs per year

28. Cost of
upstream
resync
Closer integration with
Community open source
upstream innovation
development codeline
Greater sophistication
required to manage MN
integration activity MLCL
With ME, the Resync
vendor’s internal MECL (merge)
dev branch is OSS with
MECE Contribute upstream
upstream later
Time
Product development cycle approx 2 years
Software selection decision Product shipment
made at this point made at this point

29. Working with open source is a
sophisticated supply chain
management problem ...
... not rocket science.

31. Meritocracy
evaluators
users
contributing users
contributing developers
committers
Increasing technical steering group
involvement
(benevolent) dictator

33. The future

34. “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.”
source:VisionMobile
www.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/06/lead-innovate-or-assemble-how-software-is-changing-the-macro-economics-of-mobile-handsets-2/

35. Convergence

36. Platforms

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

38. Thank you!