Stefan Schmidt wrote:
On Tue, 2006-11-21 at 17:12, Ben F-W wrote:
Stefan Schmidt wrote:
Nothing. It's exactly what FIC want.
Could you explain this? How would it benefit FIC for a rival
manufacturer to take a program developed for the OpenMoko platform and
adjust it to work on their own, closed, Linux implementation on their
phones?
Porting the apps from OpenMoko over to Qtopia is a real pita. No new
kernel features, X instead of framebuffer, gtk instead of qt. Writing
it from scratch seems easier for me.
Ah, now I understand what you mean! So the restrictions on a rival
taking our putative 'killer app' and putting it onto their own
Linux-based mobile are not legal, but technical. That makes much more
sense to me.
What I was essentially getting at here is what's called 'sustained
competitive differentiation' in marketing-speak. That means that to
break into this market, FIC would have to have a long-term advantage
over rivals that they were unable to copy - or which, by the time
they've copied it, is out of date. What concerned me about the GPL'd
'killer app' is that there was nothing to stop a rival company just
taking the program and putting it onto their own handset - which
wouldn't contravene the GPL as I understand it. Competitive
differentiation lost.
However, if what you say is true, there would be a major effort required
by the rival in converting the app over to their handset (if it runs
Qtopia). That doesn't mean that they couldn't do it, but it's a lot harder.
And you should not forget that the company has to do it alone. No
community jumps in and help.
And this is the second part of the solution. By the time the rival
company had taken a GPL'd program and adapted it for their own system,
the program they had forked would have been improved: bugs fixed,
features added and so on. So they'd have to keep maintaining the forked
program themselves - without the savings offered by the help from the
community. Competitive differentiation maintained.
This does rest on the assumption that the rival's system isn't based on
X and GTK and so on, which would mean there could still be a problem.
But it's a lot less likely in the short term.
Really open your platform and you get lots of brilliant software
engineers for free. No need to pay yopur own devs for writing apps.
More apps makes it more interesting for users.
As you can see I don't know the business plan from FIC. I only think
that I share the point of view with Sean on most of the parts.
�ave a real open platform on linux smartphones was the reason I joined
OpenEZX. And I'm eager to see OpenMoko running on it as software
stack. :)
Fully agree with all of the above!
Cheers,
Ben
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