Perhaps someday Android will be open

I really like Matt Asay — the founder of the OSBC is one of the most thoughtful people in the open source industry. (Brian Behlendorf, Chris DiBona and Cliff Schmidt are others who come to mind.)

But (and you knew there was a but) he’s really taking a lot on faith right now with Google, Android, the gPhone and the Open Vaporware Alliance.

The OVA is a Linux-based consortium copying the LiMo playbook, but about a 6-12 months behind. To use the term coined by researcher Sonali Shah, both LiMo and OVA are an example of a “gated source” community, not an open source one. Some people and companies are invited within the walls of the gated community and are allowed to participate, but others are not. That’s not open source.

The problem is that we don't know the real intentions of Google and Android: promises of openness are not openness. This also applies to LiMo and (given Nokia’s track record) to the proposed Symbian Foundation too.

In fact, that’s the whole point of open source — we don't have to rely on promises, because an approved open source license is a credible commitment that the code will be available in perpetuity.

However, even if Google releases the code someday under an open source license, that really doesn’t mean they’ve created a vibrant open source community. The IP license is only one of three dimensions of openness for sponsored open source communities, and there are plenty of examples of sponsored communities that do not provide openness on the other two dimensions, i.e. accessibility for outsiders to participate in development decisions and formal governance.

Thus far, Google’s open source projects seem to be limited to sharing code but not sharing power. I am not aware of an example (I could be wrong) of one with outside committers, although it appears that at least some less strategic projects allow outside patch suggestions (which the Google committers can accept or reject).

Even if Google’s consortium allows other firms to participate in formal governance, that doesn’t mean that it will be fully open or democratic. As with various totalitarian regimes, franchise or candidates may be limited to those who will vote the right way or those nominated for office may be vetted to vote the party line. Packing the board is quite common for consortia, trade associations, standards committees etc. — big boys like IBM, Intel, Microsoft and NTT do it, so there’s no reason to think Google and Nokia will resist the temptation.

So if Google’s promising to be open someday, maybe they will be. But Symbian Foundation or LiMo could get there first — or, for that matter, so could Microsoft, Apple or RIM if they wanted to. Lining up to endorse or promote Android because it’s “open” is like planning to take your vacation next summer at a hotel that has not yet been built.

Embedded OS technonationalism

When I was beginning my doctoral studies in the mid-1990s,
the U.S. was still worrying about global competition between technological rivals like Japan and Europe. Among a certain crowd, everything was about economic competition within the “Triad,” Ken’ichi Omae’s term for the US, Japan and Europe. (Obviously before the rise of Korea’s per capita GDP and China’s trade surpluses).

A few American scholars even talked about “technonationalism,” normally in the context of Japanese industrial policy that was aimed at the US (and that we should emulate). (I was briefly part of this crowd, and published my first few papers in 1994-96 quoting some of this work, but never made any significant contributions.) This was both fueled by and fueled the Clinton Administration’s foreign policy doctrine that war was obsolete and economic competition was the wave of the future.

One of the biggest pre-Clinton proponents of such arguments was Laura Tyson, whose treatise Who’s Bashing Whom? earned her a ticket from Berkeley to chair President Clinton’s Council of Economics Advisors. After the White House gig, Tyson went back to Berkeley’s Haas School as dean and then moved on to become dean at London Business School before returning to Berkeley. (There’s no record of her covering any Sting songs or even Blondie songs after either the CEA or dean gigs). Meanwhile, the economist passed over for the White House job has become a bitter New York Times columnnist who no longer does serious research.

All of this being a long forward to an odd article from the SJ Mercury that I read Tuesday morning on the plane (out to Philadelphia) about Japanese industrial policy for automotive embedded operating systems. The Japanese government kicked in $8.4 million [check yen] to help fund a consortium of 10 Japanese firms to develop said OS. It includes the big three auto makers (Toyota, Nissan, Honda) and major electronics suppliers like Denso (which as Nippondenso began life as was a Toyota division) and Toshiba. The story of the Japan Automotive Software Platform (JasPar) was also written up Sunday in Yomiuri (one of the big Japanese dailies) and PC World.

The money is coming from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, née Ministry of International Trade and Industry, the famed tsûsanshô of Japan’s postwar economic miracle. Spending $8m on embedded car software seems like a far cry from MITI’s glory days.

In fact, Chalmers Johnson’s book on MITI and the Japanese Miracle was required reading for budding technonationalists (or for anyone else in comparitive political economy) in the early 1990s. Listening to Chal’s night school class in 1993-1994 (and the associated office hours) had more influence on my becoming an academic than anyone else.

The MITI of the 1950s and 1960s used trade restrictions to build up Japan’s infant industries. Mark Mason studied how MITi delayed the TI integrated circuit patent in Japan long enough for Japanese firms to develop their own semiconductor capabitilies without having to pay royalties. Marie Anchordoguy (the inspirtiaton for my earliest Japan research) did her Ph.D. thesis at Berkeley (before it became Haas) on how MITI built up Fujitsu and other Japanese mainframe makers, using liberal financing in the domestic market to enable Japanese firms to undercut the prices of the the superior IBM computers.

It’s not just the Japanese, since nowadays the French view of industrial policy (dirigisme) has become the norm at the EU: after one success in a perfect storm of market timing and technology opportunity (GSM), the EC has spent almost two decades in a futile attempt to recreate that storm. (Tuesday’s report implied the Europeans also have their own automobile software consortium but I couldn’t find it, only their trade association.) Presumably the Koreans and Chinese will follow with their own national consortia, and then the US Big 2½ automakers will scream to Washington that they need their own subsidies.

But I can’t figure out what the deal is with embedded operating systems — it seems such small potatoes. The Mercury newspaper article parroted the Japanese press release “A standardized OS across the industry could have some big economic benefits, making it easier to bring new automotive technology into multiple models and bring down costs.”

Standardization has such benefits, but that doesn’t mean the Japanese carmakers have to go build their own. They could standardize tomorrow on an off-the-shelf solution from Wind River or MontaVista and get the same benefits — unless of course “bring down costs” is a code phrase for “stop paying foreign royalties.”

Don’t want royalties? Embedded Linux (or BSD if you dislike compusory sharing) is already available off the shelf for any firm. Why is the government involved? Is it that METI has to put up seed money to get Japanese firms to share and work together?

As industrial policy goes, it’s much less interesting than something major like TD-SCDMA. I suppose government industrial policy for an embedded OS is like the old line about the talking dog — what’s interesting is that he talks, not what he says.

Instead of responding with more technonationalism, perhaps MontaVista (or even Wind River) could put together an international open source coalition based on open source technologies. Given the popularity of open source in Scandanavia, they might able to peel off Saab and Volvo, which (this week at least) remain American-owned. If they did, the Chinese firms could choose to leverage the GPL technology while free-riding off the toothless enforcement of compulsory sharing in China.

Technorati Tags: compulsory sharing, consortia, embedded Linux, EU, industrial policy, Japan

Who runs the Linux Foundation?

The Free Standards Group has finished its friendly bailout of Open Source Development Labs, with the announcement Tuesday of election results for the Linux Foundation merged board of directors. The result seems to be an entity that is governed according to the FSG, but run more by the OSDL than the FSG.

The old FSG board had 9 members, and the OSDL board had 14 (later 12) members. The carryovers to the 14-member 15-member LF board are unsurprising:

• James Bottomley (SteelEye), Dan Frye (IBM), Hsashi Hashimoto (Hitachi) and Tsugikazu Shibata (NEC) from the OSDL board;
• Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu) and Andrew Updegrove (law firm Gesmer Updegrove) from the FSG board;
• Masahiro Date (Fujitsu) and Markus Rex (Novell, formerly of SuSE) from both boards; and
• Doug Fisher of Intel, replacing two Intel representative: Fisher (former OSDL chairman) and Dirk Hohndel (of FSG)

Slightly more interesting are a few new faces:

• Christine Martino of HP replaces Steve Geary of HP from both boards;
• Wim Coekaerts, the main Linux person at Oracle;
• Christy Wyatt of Motorola;
• Tim Golden of Bank of America;
• Brian Pawlowski of NetApp; and
• Marc Miller of AMD. This never would have happened at OSDL with Intel as one of its key founders and one of the largest (if not the largest) investor.

The most interesting to me were the names that were dropped:

• From FSG: Theodore Ts'o (top Linux lieutenant) and two nonprofit reps, Jim Lacey of the Linux Professional Institute and John Weathersby of the Open Source Software Institute;
• From OSDL: Stuart Cohen (who quit as CEO in December), his predecessor Jerry Greenberg (ex-TurboLinux, later OSDL CEO from 2002 to 2003), Larry Augustin (founder of VA Software), and Frank Fanzilli (retired CIO of CSFB).

The LF board looks very very corporate, with the same heavy Japanese representation as OSDL. The LF did away with the two dedicated non-profit seats, although it keeps three at-large seats; the remaining seats are reserved for paying members. As with FSG, there are tiers of members and directors, and in fact the LF retains the same membership tiers (and the website still lists the same members) as the FSG. However, the election doesn’t seem to conform to the Linux Foundation bylaws.

The eight Platinum members who pay $500k/year are each guaranteed a seat, which explains the holdovers (Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell) and the new Oracle rep. The Gold members who pay $200k/year are promised three seats: AMD, NetApp and BofA Motorola. The Silver who pay $20k/year get one director, apparently BofA. And then the three at large directors: one required by the bylaws to represent the technical advisory board (Bottomley) and two other at-large directors (Shuttleworth, Updegrove).

Another measure of who won the merger is infrastructure. The directory structure of www.Linux-Foundation.org is that of the old www.FreeStandards.org, and the LF headquarters is in San Francisco (as in FSG) and not Oregon (as was OSDL).

Update 8:30 p.m.: Mea culpa. I had several initial mistakes which led me to believe there was a gap between the bylaws and the new directors. The StandardsBlog posting omitted Wyatt of Motorola (a Gold member) and thus implied there were 14 members; the official press release is complete. Amanda McPherson of LF e-mailed to clarify that BofA is a Silver member (although they are still not listed among the official members on the website.)

Technorati Tags: consortia, Linux, open source, standardization

Is LiMo Gated or Open Source?

The use of Linux in mobile phones is one of the big growth areas for embedded Linux. As mobile CPUs got faster and RAM got bigger, the once ludicrous idea of putting Linux on a phone has become feasible. (For those don’t know the players in the mobile OS platform wars, the most detailed (free) analysis can be found in a comprehensive 52-page report by Andreas Constantinou of VisionMobile Ltd.)

Last June, several existing vendors of Linux-based mobile phones (as well as two of the world’s biggest operators) announced an alliance to try to create unified Linux standards. The players were:

• NTT DoCoMo, NEC and Panasonic Mobile Communications, creators of the MOAP-L Linux stack used for some of NTT’s phones. (Other DoCoMo phones use the MOAP-S platform based on the Symbian OS)
• Motorola, the 2nd largest cell phone maker, whose EZX platform is based on code from MontaVista and Trolltech
• Samsung, the 3rd largest cell phone maker
• Vodafone, which as the world’s largest mobile phone operator, would like to sell more commodity handsets

Conspiciously absent was Nokia (the world’s largest handset maker again in 2006), which has released two Linux-based WiFi tablets but (thus far) no Linux GSM phones.

This week, the alliance got a new name and formal structure. The LiMo Foundation has been incorporated in Delaware but is headquartered in England. Aspects of the foundation appear patterned after the Eclipse Foundation, the most successful open source R&D consortium to date.

The Mobile Phone Development blog (where I learned of the new foundation), dug through the documents and found that they suggest the technical scope and architecture for the planned collaboration.

As someone who researches open source governance and communities, I found something else to be even more interesting. The nine-page white paper outlining the Foundation’s goals and structure says:

Membership in the Foundation is open, subject only to the payment of dues while access to the Foundation source code is subject solely to being a Member and compliance with a security-related self-certification and other specified security measures. [Emphasis added]

Unless I misread this, they are creating what Sonali Shah terms a “gated source” community — not an open source community — in which only members inside a “gate” get access to the source code. (Her recently published paper explains more about the concept).

One way to read this is that they made a simple mistake, and they actually intend to share derivative works of the GPL-licensed Linux with the entire world, without fee or membership. After, this is the way that embedded Linux is supposed to work. The other way to read this is that the partners just don’t “get” open source: Motorola has gotten criticism for not sharing EZX changes, while NEC and another Panasonic division were part of the CE Linux Forum, which also had trouble cooperating in an open community.

So far, Nokia has done much better. While Nokia often tries to be a vertically integrated company and push its own standards, on open source (and the 770 and 800), they appear to get it. Another open source research colleague, Sebastian Spaeth of ETH Zürich, is preparing a case study documenting what Nokia did and why.

Technorati Tags: communities, embedded Linux, mobile phones, open source, R&D consortia

Did OSDL’s Business Model Fail?

As many people have reported, Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG) are merging. I first learned about it from Andy Updegrove’s blog (imagine, a lawyer blogging at 6pm on a Sunday night). It is being presented as a merger, but (as with the Alcatel-Lucent or HP-Compaq "mergers") it’s obvious that the FSG is taking over the OSDL. And as Steven Vaughan-Nichols remarked, given their overlapping missions, "What took them so long?"

Only one of the articles that I saw, by Charles Babcock at Information Week, linked the merger to OSDL’s obvious financial difficulties, as evidenced by the last month’s announcement that its CEO had quit and it was reducing its staff by 30%. I don’t know if such a linkage is considered too subjective (aka “analysis” or “commentary”) or if the FL/OSS fans among the press feel obliged to only report good news.

Which raises the question, if it couldn’t pay its bills, did OSDL’s business model fail? As I noted in 2004 (in a journal article that was finally published last year in R&D Management), OSDL is just an industrial R&D consortium whose results spill over to non-members more readily than for a typical consortium.

Any consortium — whether in the auto industry or one of Updegrove’s computer industry standards consortia — must serve the interests of its members to get the revenues necessary to keep the doors open. So if the OSDL consortium wasn’t supporting the business models of its members — or it was supporting the business models of an ever-decreasing number of members — then that would account for the financial problems.

Another possibility is mission creep, a chronic temptation for nonprofits that don’t want to go out of business. The best known example is the March of Dimes, which helped cure polio but switched to birth defects and prenatal health to stick around for another 50 years. So perhaps OSDL has accomplished its original mission — legitimating Linux — and it’s earned a well-earned retirement.

Absent inside information, right now I have more questions than answers. Perhaps an enterprising reporter will follow up.