Google gets the competition it deserves

At this week’s Mobile World Congress, the conference is focused on what happens next, now after Android has captured the majority of the world’s smartphone sales — and continues to gain share. Some distant clouds are on the horizon.

The WSJ this week asked whether the leading Android vendor, Samsung, is going to assert its buyer power against Google.

Google executives worry that Samsung has become so big—the South Korean company sells about 40% of the gadgets that use Google's Android software—that it could flex its muscle to renegotiate their arrangement and eat into Google's lucrative mobile-ad business, people familiar with the matter said.

The story said “Android head Andy Rubin … said Samsung could become a threat if it gains more ground among mobile-device makers that use Android.” The WSJ followed up with a blog posting asking “Can Samsung’s competitors catch up?” while Fierce Wireless reported a Samsung VP’s denial that Samsung’s success threatens Android.

The original WSJ story speculated that Samsung might ask for better terms, e.g. preferential access to technology.

In some ways, we’ve seen this story before. Symbian was supposed to be an open multi-vendor platform, but when Nokia accounted for 80%+ market share, it transformed both the Nokia-Symbian relationship and the level of interest and commitment by other vendors to Symbian. Yes, Google’s much richer and more independent than Symbian ever was, but it faces some of the same pressures that Symbian did. As it is, Samsung is making more profit from Android phones than Google is (an interesting reversal of the Microsoft-Dell exemplar).

(Google’s downstream vertical integration into Motorola is offered as an insurance policy, but since Motorola has been slowly dying for a decade, it’s not clear how credible a bargaining chip that is.)

Similarly, Samsung continues to support Tizen (the embedded Linux successor to LiMo, Moblin and Maemo), and plans on offering a new phone based on Tizen this summer. Samsung is using Tizen as an upward compatible replacement for its homegrown Bada, but it’s unclear how credible a bargaining chip Tizen will be — since it hasn’t offered a new Bada phone in two years.

The other challenge to Android comes with the introduction of the Firefox OS. Since handset OS makers — Google, Apple, Microsoft — are promulgating their own browsers, apparently the Mozilla Foundation figures they need an OS to put their browser into people’s hands.

The Firefox OS won support from LG, ZTE, Huawei and Alcatel, as well as serious interest from Sony (née Sony Ericsson née Ericsson) — but not from Samsung. It’s expected to ship from 18 carriers in nine countries, but not the US until at least next year.

There’s of course the question whether the world needs another smartphone OS, let alone another open source OS (remember webOS). After Android (69%) and iPhone (22%) together have 81% of the market, no other platform has more than 5% — with Tizen and Firefox starting behind Blackberry, WinMo and Symbian. But there’s no guarantee that the most popular OS in the US or Europe will be the most popular OS in China, particularly when China’s two largest handset vendors are supporting both Android and Firefox OS.

So based on recent history, Google’s concern in developed markets should be Samsung throwing its market power around (either within Android or to a rival platform), rather than having Firefox (or BlackBerry or WinMo) catch it any time this decade. It needs monitor Tizen or Firefox in the BRIC countries, but that could just be a matter of providing extra tech support engineers for Huawei and ZTE.

MeeGo: Nokia and Intel learn to let go

For years, I was trying to figure out why the world needed two Linux-based tablet operating systems: Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. Almost three years ago, Intel created Moblin as a fork of Maemo and its Hildon UI (inherited from Symbian).

The reality was that the world didn’t need a forked niche mobile platform, but of course forking is the reality of open source. The changes may be available, but when not invented here and an unwillingness to share control get involved, corporate egos trump the nominal openness of an open source license.

The two factions have been flirting with cooperation but had been unwilling to consummate the deal. On Monday, they finally did.

In an announcement at the European cellphone industry’s global big tradeshow — Mobile World Congress — the two factions announced plans to merge the two code bases. As Nokia’s open source guru reported in his blog:

We’ve been busy with our friends @ Intel.

We decided to expand the relationship we started already last spring. We merge Maemo and Moblin projects into one single project called MeeGo. MeeGo is an open software platform – an operating system – for a wide range of devices. It’ll run on X86 and on Arm based hardware. It will be developed as an open project hosted by the Linux Foundation.

So what does it mean? Many things.

Joint development
We will merge Maemo and Moblin projects. Their architecture is already very similar. They share many components but sometimes use different versions. But they build and integrate releases independently. And while Maemo is for ARM, Moblin is for X86. Now we merge them to get the best of both. A good Moblin build and integration, Maemo’s mobile optimizations and ARM support, Qt etc. We can also now make the bright engineers of Intel and Nokia to work close together.

Of course, the announcement is less about saving R&D engineers and more about combining installed bases, APIs, ecosystems, and third party developers. Neither platform was very interesting on its own, but together the hope is Meego will be the future for both ARM and x86 devices. Both will use Nokia’s QT and Nokia will peddle applications via its (struggling) Ovi store.

More importantly, both Nokia and Intel let go, and turned control over to a neutral broker — the Linux Foundation. LF (like its predecessors OSDL and FSG) has plenty of experience contending with giant corporate egos.

The one thing that seems ambiguous is the positioning vs. the world’s most famous (quasi) Linux mobile platform, i.e. Android. Are sponsors being coy about avoiding comparisons to Android, or is this really an up-market alternative, between handsets and PCs? In an era of iPads and netbooks, will such distinctions remain a year or two from now?

Hat tip: tweeter David Wood, live from Mobile World Congress.

The Linux iPhone that wasn’t

Didn’t see it last week, but John Gruber claims that outgoing iPod guru Tony Fadell had wanted to make the iPhone using Linux. No one else is reporting it (except to quote Gruber), so it’s either a bonafide scoop or just a fanciful rumor.

LiMo moving forward

Normally every August, I attend the LinuxWorld SF conference. It’s a handy way of catching up on what’s going on in open source. However, this last week while LinuxWorld was in Moscone I was back in the Boston area at the user/open innovation conference.

I’m sorry I wasn’t there, because it sounds like it would have been an opportunity to learn the latest about LiMo and their plans to create an embedded Linux mobile phone platform.

LiMo announced seven new handsets, for a total of 21 now available using the LiMo combined Linux and mobile-specific stack.

On the one hand, LiMo is much further along than the world’s most famous embedded Linux alliance the gPhone aka Android aka the Open Vaporware Alliance. On the other hand, it’s well behind the 77 shipping phones (at last count) that Symbian has attracted while supplying two-thirds of the world’s smart phones.

Right now, the LiMo handsets appear to be mainly Motorola (which has been toying with Linux for years) and NTT DoCoMo (which could hurt Symbian’s Japan business). Samsung, Motorola and LG — the world’s #2, #3 and #5 handset makers — are all hedging their bets between LiMo, OVA and Symbian.

Limo’s marketing director claims that LiMo is pressuring Symbian with its openness, and dismissed Nokia’s plans for a Symbian Foundation:

“It means we're moving toward a more collaborative environment,” he said. “We see it as an endorsement of the strategy we developed. LiMo has had an advanced and intricate governance model, and now analysts have said the governance model they're working on for Symbian will be very similar, so we see it is a validating point for the idea of collaboration and openness. It allows us to shift the conversation around openness from debating its merits to talking about tactics.”

Although I have personal (and professional) ties to Symbian, I’ve not talked to anyone in authority at LiMo, Symbian Foundation (Nokia) or the OVA. However, as an analyst, I would say this statement counts as blowing smoke. Here’s why:

• LiMo has shipping product, little market share, but still is a gated source project, with a minimum admission fee of $40k/year.
• Symbian has market share, has shared source with its licensees (including the world’s five biggest handset makers), but hasn’t started either the gated or open source process.
• Android has neither open source nor handsets (yet).

Neither LiMo nor Symbian (let alone OVA) are open source communites. As any one knowledgeable about open source will tell you, gated source is not open source.

There’s no reason for Symbian (or Android) to copy LiMo’s “open source” strategy because there’s nothing to copy. The only successful model for an industry cooperative open source effort is the IBM-founded Eclipse (which borrowed many ideas from Apache), and it’s clear that Nokia is planning to copy Eclipse. Its planned $1,500 annual fee (same as Symbian’s newest commercial program) is a long way from LiMo’s $40,000.

So someday at least one company will have an open source mobile phone platform that is fully open in terms of production, governance and IP. (It’s possible that LiMo and Android will merge, but given the egos involved, I don’t see it happening before 2010). Who will get there first?

I think it comes down to business models. As I mentioned yesterday, one of my favorite papers is about how “open” turns out to be both a loaded word and a fuzzy concept. It costs a lot of money to run an open source foundation, let alone keep the code current and up to date. Charging money for gated source is one way to support the effort, which falls apart if you actually move to an open live code repository.

If you can’t charge for source, another way to pay the bills is to cross-subsidize the efforts from another profit source. LiMo doesn’t have a sugar daddy, but both Android and Symbian do. So from an economic (rather than technical or organization) sense, both OVA and Symbian will have a much easier time opening the kimono than will LiMo.

Rebooting Linux at 34,000'

I’ve spent a lot of time on Continental Airlines planes the past week, going to and from a conference on platforms held in London. It was my first time flying Continental ever, and on the whole I was pleasantly surprised as they offer the amenities that were once standard among US carriers until commodization meant that the major trunk airlines started treating customers as inconvenient nusiances.

Tuesday afternoon I spent 10 hours crossing six timezones in a steel tube operated by CO that (according to my seatpocket) was a Boeing 777-200.

At one point while trying to play my favorite 20th century choral mass on the seatback entertainment system, it decided to reboot, spewing Linux kernel text messages on the LCD screen.

While I couldn’t take a screen dump of the messages, it was pretty easy to see that I was watching RedBoot (tm) from Red Hat Software — a build of November 19, 2004 — for a system called “MAS eFX.” A little web surfing after we landed makes it clear that the MAS stands for Matsushita Avionics Systems, and that eFX is known to the embedded community.

That a seatback system would use embedded Linux was no surprise; that it would take 4-5 minutes to reboot was a bit more unexpected. That it would spew messages such as “loading XX will taint the kernel” — whether due to a “proprietary license” or “no license” — is an obvious attempt by the GPLniks to discourage the use of non-GPL modules when running Linux.

But why should an airline passenger sitting in seat 20L care? Why is this message (or any of the other messages) being displayed at 34,000'? This is user hostile design — and, in fact, not the only part of this system that would qualify.

Week in review

This week I’ve been swamped coaching my two simulation teams in the final rounds of their International Collegiate Business Strategy Competition. A long slog that began on Jan. 7 (during winter vacation) ended Saturday with both teams victorious.

However, I wanted to comment quickly on a few items:

• The WSJ had a great article (available free) on how Vizio used offshore manufacturing to come from nowhere to be one of the top TV makers — in a virtual three-way tie (with Sony and Samsung) for the most LCD sales in North America. Consumer electronics has been a brutal commodity business with entrenched competitors and (except for flat panels) excess capacity, so Vizio’s success (using open innovation) should be an inspiration for upstarts everywhere.
• Red Hat has beat a retreat from the desktop Linux business. Which Windows advantage matter most — the one from network effects or switching costs? (The exact question I tried to answer with my dissertation). I don’t know, but If Red Hat can’t make it, it’s hard to see how Linux is going to be a major factor in consumer or business PCs — at least in countries with high existing PC penetration rates.
• Adobe’s new Photoshop Express website got a very nice writeup in the WSJ — which basically said it’s about as good as the 1.0 of an online photo program can be. This shows that not only is Adobe trying to remake itself into a SAAS company, but its skills are transferrable. Also that by requiring Flash, its can continue to use its position in one software segment to boost another.
• Some (but not all) of the 4G wireless equipment makers agreed to a patent cooperating agreement to speed adoption of the GSM/W-CDMA derived LTE technology. It’s not clear if the parties have agreed to a formal pool or a set of rules — either for valuing patents or (as announced in August) for deciding which patents are essential. Given the past failure of telecom patent cooperation, this seems more like a promise to agree rather than an ironclad agreement.
• The patent “reform” bill S.1145 seems to be dying, with those big IT companies that want to weaken patents (e.g. Apple, Cisco) unable to overcome the opposition of those that like them just as they are. I wonder if anyone in D.C. understands “win-win” — such as recent efforts to make patent examination more rigorous and accurate.

Linux Mobile fragmentation-or is it consolidation?

My friend Tom Chavez forwarded the news that NTT DoCoMo and some of its handset vendors have blessed the Access (née Palm Source) plans for a Linux-based mobile phone platform:

ACCESS CO., LTD., a global provider of advanced software technologies to the mobile and beyond-PC markets, today announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with NTT DoCoMo, Inc., NEC Corp., Panasonic Mobile Communications Co., Ltd., and ESTEEMO Co., Ltd. under which the companies will study the use of ACCESS Linux Platform(TM) as the basis for developing a shared Linux® platform for mobile phones and an operator pack for NTT DoCoMo. …

Under the MOU, ACCESS will make use of MOAP(L) (Mobile Oriented Application Platform based on Linux) which is the FOMA(TM) mobile platform used by NTT DoCoMo, and will lead the development of a shared software platform that also conforms to specifications of the LiMo Foundation, an independent, non-profit foundation established with the aim of promoting the use of Linux by the mobile industry. The five companies have also agreed to consider development of an operator pack for NTT DoCoMo based on the shared platform. ACCESS intends to begin marketing the commercial products resulting from these efforts during fiscal 2009.

So what we have is an (at least partial) convergence of Access’s technology, with the LiMo standards effort, and DoCoMo’s existing MOAP(L) smart phone platform. DoCoMo sees it as helping LiMo:

"In January this year, NTT DoCoMo established the LiMo Foundation, together with key companies worldwide," said Kiyohito Nagata, senior vice president, managing director of Product Department, Products & Services, NTT DoCoMo. "The conclusion of this memorandum will substantially expedite the development of a shared platform based on LiMo Foundation specifications, as well as promote consideration of an operator pack by the five participating companies. In this way, the memorandum will contribute to the dissemination and growth of the Linux platform and the creation of an associated ecosystem. We expect it to enable the development of products that are even more attractive to NTT DoCoMo."

Of course, DoCoMo is also a founding partner of Google's “Open Handset Alliance”. How can it do both OHA and Limo? Last month, DoCoMo claimed to be agnostic:

Explaining the apparent conflict [DoCoMo spokesman Shuichiro] Ichikoshi said, “Our corporate stance is that we are neutral and open to whatever technologies or software that may contribute to progress/pervasion of W-CDMA services or improvement of our services. Consequently, we will openly evaluate and examine Android, as we do with LiMo.”

In other words, DoCoMo joined OHA/Android to have a seat at Google’s table — at least to keep an eye on them, and (if things go well) to nudge Google in their direction. But, it’s clear from the latest announcement, their main goal is to have a DoCoMo-controlled MOAP(L) going forward, and make sure that it conforms to the LiMo spec (and vice versa). Befitting any former telecom monopoly, they would rather be in the driver’s seat than be a spectator in Google’s show.

So on the one hand, DoCoMo isn’t fully committed to the gPhone alliance. On the other hand, it sees three previously distinct efforts — MOAP(L), Access, and LiMo — as heading on a convergent path. (Perhaps a trajectory fueled by a billion or more of DoCoMo’s yen).

gPhone becomes Open Vaporware Alliance

Today Google announced the gPhone. What is it? Yet another version of mobile Linux with yet another trade association —— the Open Handset Alliance — which is led by Google, T-Mobile, HTC, Qualcomm and Motorola as the major sponsors (in that order according to the press release).

There are so many levels on which I could dissect the announcement, but I still have to keep my day job, so let me mention only a few:

• Motorola is also a member of the LiMo Foundation, Gnome Mobile and other mobile Linux initiatives, but only some of its allies from these initiatives (Intel, DoCoMo, Samsung) are present here.
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt bragged that this is not a mere phone (take that, Apple) but a platform: "Today's announcement is more ambitious than any single 'Google Phone' that the press has been speculating about over the past few weeks. ... Our vision is that the powerful platform we're unveiling will power thousands of different phone models."
• Now we know why Google paid untold billions in July 2005 for Android Inc., the company at the center of Google's new initiative. Co-founders Andy Rubin (who also founded Danger, OS suppliers to Sidekick) and Rich Miner are firm believers in a post-PC world, as evidenced by Miner's quote in the NYT

  "There is a good chance that the number of potential consumers of Google…may never have a PC. ... So one of our clear goals was to find a way and have a platform (to) deliver Google services, Google content and Google search into those markets, and the mobile phone is going to clearly become much more of a development platform."

• With Qualcomm are its two most bitter US rivals, Broadcom and TI, both of whom would like to destroy its business model.
• The Japanese carriers represented include both Qualcomm-loyalist KDDI and nemesis DoCoMo. Among CDMA carriers in the US, Sprint is aboard but Verizon is notably absent. Of the three major European carriers, T-Mobile is present but Vodafone and Orange are missing. Other GSM carriers including China Mobile and (in Europe) Telefonica and Telecom Italia, but not AT&T, the only major US GSM carrier.

There are some reasons for skepticism:

• In addition to the carriers, absent were the major European and Japanese handset makers. In particular, Nokia and Ericsson are firmly committed to the Symbian platform, and even if Google's Web 2.0-enabled vision becomes a reality, can have the best of web- and native-client applications through their existing smartphone investments.
• The fawning pro-Google euphoria was reminiscent of, well, Apple's iPhone roll-out. Even 10 months ago, Steve Jobs did a demo of his vaporware, and all the OHA had to offer today is a phone call. Plans to ship "second half of 2008" puts them 12-18 months behind the iPhone.
• Instead of the fawning headlines, the term "open" should have been used in quotes (but then the reporters don't study open standards for a living). This is another pay to play trade association, and right now it's not clear how open it is (although almost any Linux group is more open than LiMo).

There are other holes in the story. Android co-founder Rubin said "We've created the platform to be open source," but most of the platform components and layers (as far as we can tell) existed long before Google/Android came along. Rubin also claimed that the phone is the ultimate Internet phone:

Our partners will say that the phone does the Internet, in a way other phones don't do the Internet. We don't have to brand it. When you walk into the store and see a phone with lots of Net applications, vs. others with hardly any, people will get it very quickly.

Of course, the iPhone also does the Internet (pretty well) and most of Apple's major rivals plan their own mobile web strategy. A year is a long time, and it's now certain Nokia will be ready. Motorola and Samsung are both Symbian and LiMo participants, so maybe they hope someone will give them a first-class mobile web experience.

Embedded Linux is doing what it does best, which is fragment like crazy: 2007 has brought more fragmentation and not less. Maybe Gnome Mobile was going nowhere (the website looks a little stale), but the joint effort of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo seemed promising both from a business and technical standpoint.

Mobile LinuxWorld: Accessing the other Palm story

If Palm Inc. (née Palm Computing) is trying to find life after the PDA, its former alter ego (PalmSource) is trying to run to the front of the parade of adapting Linux to mobile platforms.

Of course, PalmSource was purchased in fall 2005 by Access of Japan, outbidding Palm (Inc.) and Motorola. This was only about six months after PalmSource started shifting towards an embedded Linux strategy with its money-saving strategy of buying China MobileSoft, a Nanjing-based Linux developer.

Today, the business cards in the booth say Access Systems Americas, but the address show the same Sunnyvale address of the former PalmSource.

“How did they hope to make money off of Linux?” is what I asked myself after the original sale, rebranding, and abandonment of ongoing Palm OS revenues. Actually, after visiting the booth (and doing some background research), I realized I already had the answer. What ASA (PalmSource) is doing is exactly what I would have recommended from my 7 years of studying “how do firms make money from open source” — and they didn’t have to pay me a dime.

The most obvious point was the Access Linux Platform (ALP) architecture diagram — which is a mixture of off-the-shelf open source (shown here in blue), technology developed by ASA released as open source (purple), and the proprietary code licensed by ASA (gray).

As I understand it, ASA’s open source contribution is mostly found in the “Hiker” project, which is intended to supply many of the key APIs missing from GTK/GNOME but necessary for writing real native Linux mobile applications. (Hiker is described in a PDF white paper and now has a downloadable tarball). The Hiker part was originally MPL (because it’s a better license) but OSS guru “Lefty” Schlessinger said it will be available Real Soon Now dual-licensed in LGPL(v2) to make the GPL-centric GNOME community happy.

As befitting all the ex-Apple people at ASA, its decision to give away some (but not all) technology parallels the early Apple Computer open source strategy, which I described in a 2003 research paper as “opening parts.” It also fits the general pattern I found in my subsequent larger study of open source business models, where firms sell some parts and give away others.

In addition to the opening parts, the other key point was that (as Bill Lee of ASA developer relations told me) “On this side [of the Pacific], we’re a services company.” Services (despite lower margins) are also common with open source companies. Services have historically been big in the embedded market because no two devices are identical. Unlike the PC industry (where commonality is sought to reduce costs), embedded device makers relish differences (and differentiation) as they seek to push the envelope. There are lots of reasons why hardware companies need help with embedded software, which is why there are companies like MontaVista.

In fact, (today) ASA doesn’t sell a Linux distribution, but assumes that most of its customers have an existing distribution from MontaVista or Wind River (which just won Palm Inc.’s business). This was probably the part that made the least sense: once upon a time PalmSource sold an entire operating system, so the dependency on MontaVista or Wind River doesn’t make sense in the long run. That seems easily fixed: four years ago, WindRiver was a proprietary embedded OS company and the ultimate anti-Linux — and then they got into Linux. So Access could buy (or sell to) an existing Linux distro, or build it from scratch.

ASA is evangelizing developers (using the process perfected by Apple in the 1980s) to support its new Access Linux Platform. (To run the installed base of 25,000 old Palm OS apps, the ALP has a Palm OS compatibility layer). I’m sorry I couldn’t make Tuesday’s developer event but they wanted money and besides I was out of town. In addition to courting ISVs, ASA has also won support as the preferred Linux provider to Orange, the large French mobile phone operator.

There was one more surprise as I riffled through the various ALP white papers, i.e. marketing brochures (in the dead tree version handed out at the booth but also available online.) To put it starkly, Access wants to be the Symbian of mobile Linux.

Specifically, their white paper “Mobile Linux - Going Native” contains arguments that could have been ripped from a Symbian brochure. For users of “smartphones” (a term practically invented by Symbian), it extols the importance of making full native applications (as with a PDA or PC) rather than using lightweight application frameworks like Java or BREW. One excerpt:

Applications that run in a “sandbox” are nice, but future users of smartphones will come to expect the performance and capabilities of applications designed to run in native mode.

So Symbian and Access are predicting a world in which native applications continue to matter, while Google and thus far Apple expect mobile devices to use device-independent rich internet apps (based on things like Ajax) to be the wave of the future. The jury is still out.

Technorati Tags: business models, conferences, embedded Linux, GNOME, mobile phones, open source, Palm

Mobile LinuxWorld: A tale of two Palms

Regular readers know that I spent 15+ years as an Apple Computer ISV and did my dissertation on Apple’s missteps and struggle for survival in the 1990s. I published a book chapter that IMHO is the definitive treatment (thus far of their woes), plus another paper on the operations and e-commerce aspects of their turnaround.

During Apple’s troubles, many of its employees bailed to the next great thing in computing platforms, i.e. Palm Computing, founded in 1992. Palm picked up a lot of Apple people and from the outside it seems like Palm picked up much of the Apple culture. Now it seems to be reprising Apple’s woes, but a decade later and with a different root cause.

Since 2003, the company founded by Jeff Hawkins has been split into two. (In fact, I met my now-coauthor Mike Mace back in May 2002 when we tried to get Palm to let me study the split.) Palm originally split into PalmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software), but PalmOne immediately bought rival Handspring to get Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky back.

When PalmOne (now Palm) bought back an OS license and the trademark from PalmSource, I assumed that its future was stable. Meanwhile, PalmSource — deprived of its only remaining major customer, seemed doomed, particularly after it was bought by Access, an obscure Japanese web browser company.

After my visit to LinuxWorld, I’ve pretty much done a 180°. The PalmSource strategy today makes a lot of sense, whereas I still can’t figure out what Palm Inc. is going to do to survive.

Palm was showing the Foleo, the “mobile companion” unveiled to great hoopla in May. At the booth they said the Foleo is due to ship “this summer” (which I pointed out would have to be sometime in the next 6 weeks).

Fitting the Apple legacy, the Foleo is a lot like the eMate 300 — Apple’s last gasp to save Newton PDA by making one with a bigger screen and a keyboard. The Foleo is somewhere between a PDA and a laptop in price and capabilities. The one difference is that it doesn’t run PalmOS, it runs Linux; during LinuxWorld Palm announced it would use the WindRiver Linux distribution from now on.

I see three problems with the Foleo. First, it’s neither fish nor fowl so the market may not understand it. Although it had some dedicated owners, the eMate was no great market success. And since then, laptop computers have fallen below $800, eliminating the price argument for the most price sensitive.

Second, it’s a new platform, with a new ecosystem and a new user training curve. If desktop Linux were established, a slimmed-down Linux subnotebook could be a smash hit. As it is, there are few desktop Linux apps. Even if there were, they wouldn’t run because Palm went off and invented their own UI because (unlike Motorola or PalmSource) they didn’t like GTK or the other technologies that seem to be coalescing in the Gnome Mobile initiative.

Finally, there are already devices in this intermediate position. They’re called smartphones, specifically the Nokia Communicator series of phones, which have been shipping to European loyalists since 1996.

	Nokia	Palm	HP
	E90	Foleo	nc2400
Price	~~ $1100	$599†	$1400
Weight	7.4 oz	2.5 lbs	2.9 lbs
Screen size		10.2"	12.1"
Resolution	800x352	1024x600	1280x800
Keyboard	mini	compact	standard
Wi-Fi	yes	yes	yes
Phone	GSM	-	-
Optical drive	-	-	CD-RW/DVD-ROM
OS	Symbian 9.2, S60 Rev 3.1	Linux 2.4, proprietary UI	Windows XP
Applications	thousands	built-in	hundreds of thousands

† Before $100 rebate

The Nokia is smaller, more portable, and makes phone calls to boot. Plus the new ones share a common platform with 70+ million S60 phones out there. Ordinary laptops also are available for a slightly higher price at roughly the same weight. So if I were an internal MIS dept., would I choose to develop for the world’s leading cell phone maker (with a 12-year track record on this product family), the ubiquitous PC platform, or the last surviving firm in a dying product category with its brand new and unproven platform?

The only advantage is the price: it’s cheaper than the most portable business-oriented computers (or the Nokia), although still quite a bit above the $200 of today’s OLPC price.

Technorati Tags: embedded Linux, Linux, mobile phones, Palm

Mobile LinuxWorld: Motorola

In Thursday’s visit to LinuxWorld Expo, I decided to focus on mobile Linux — both because I’m interested, and also (like Linux on the server 5 years ago) because there are a lot of interesting and important changes happening right now.

Probably the biggest news at LinuxWorld was that Motorola unveiled its new open source initiative at the show. Consistent with Motorola’s youth-oriented (i.e. text messaging) ersatz word construction (rokr, razr, etc.) the Linux initiative is called Motomagx (or MOTOMAGX if you’re screaming). I spent a half hour in the Motorola booth, talking to someone from the UK about the strategy, and then filled in the gaps up with online research.

Motorola has been talking about its Linux phone strategy for more than five years. Unlike Nokia (which has a very consistent platform strategy), Motorola has been dabbling with various technologies, often with no two phones in the same family using the same OS. Thus far, Motorola has mainly used Linux for a series of Chinese smartphones.

This week’s news was about phones, about a new corporate platform strategy, and about Motorola’s embrace of open source. [Since I’m posting a little late, “this week” refers to the week of Aug. 6]

New Phones

This week the Motorola booth was showing two new Linux-based phones: the music-optimized MOTOROKR Z6 and the Motorola RAZR2 V8 handsets, both of which are now shipping. As the press release says, “The RAZR2 V8 will be Motorola’s first Linux-based device bound for North America, representing another milestone in the company’s global mobile Linux leadership.”

I was a little puzzled, because this week it’s called a Motorokr Z6 but 7 months ago it was a Motorizr Z6. (Both were said to be Linux based). Interestingly, the official page for the Motorokr Z6 has a picture link that in the HTML says “Motorizr Z6.” (Today the Motorizr seems to come in a Z3 and Z8 but not a Z6).

Meanwhile, the Motorola RAZR2 V8 was announced in June, and is an EDGE version of the RAZR2 V9 phone for WCDMA networks.

New Platform Strategy

Motorola had a big booth at a Linux show. Although it would love to have attendees buy a phone, the booth (and the full day of training sessions) were intended to attract developers to the Motomagx platform.

As I understand it, Motorola’s new platform strategy segments the handset market into three tiers:

• Low end is Ajar targeted at mass-market phones, which is expected to comprise 30% of unit sales. Oddly, the Ajar website has info for handset vendors, but it’s hard to imagine someone else would license this.
• Mid range is Motomagx (Linux). In (last) Monday’s press release, Motorola said Linux will be 60% of all unit sales “in the next few years.”
• High end is Windows Mobile or Symbian, as represented by its Q phone (as well as the MPx200, MPx220) and Motorizr Z8, respectively.

This is analogous to the Nokia platform strategy, which uses the proprietary S40 for its low-end phones, and S60 (with Symbian) for its high-end phones. Motorola’s difference is that it has unprecedented hopes for going from little to mostly Linux across a broad swath of customers in the developed and developing world; Motorola will either drive Linux adoption in mobile phones, or show why Linux is not yet ready for such widespread usage.

The new Motomagx platform will be replacing Motorola’s existing proprietary platform, Synergy. Motomagx should be comparable to the Synergy UI, as in the V3xx phone being shown in the booth. The features should also be comparable, although (as with any platform) I expect the Motomagx features to grow over time.

Even the names have meaning: Synergy and Ajar sound like code names, while Motomagx is a Motorola vowel-impaired consumer brand. Is this “Intel inside”? To me, a platform brand would imply a common user experience and set of features — not merely an enabling technology for a family of unrelated devices.

The branding ties back to Motorola’s overall phone strategy. As the inventor of the hand-held mobile phone, Motorola seems to be a company that distinguishes itself with hardware design and while software has been just an afterthought. If Motorola is branding a software platform (and not just a family of hardware products), perhaps this is changing.

Open Source Strategy

Unlike earlier one-off Linux efforts aimed at China like the Motoming (A1200), the new phones reflect more of a consistent platform strategy. The new phones use a stock Linux kernel, and the Z6 is “all open source.”

On the one hand, Motorola is being utterly corporate, as befits a company that’s been one of the top 3 mobile phone makers for the past 30 years. It’s got its fingers into all the various Linux standardization initiatives:

• Linux Mobile (LiMo), a gated source effort driven by European mobile phone carriers;
• LinuxFoundation, the main nonprofit promoting Linux for all uses (big and small); Motorola had a director seat for OSDL (before its bailout) and now has one for the Linux Foundation.
• CE Linux Forum, the group intended to commoditize MontaVista Linux.
• Gnome Mobile initiative, the group trying to adapt GNOME and GTK for mobile phones (with support from Intel, Nokia and others)

The one that is missing is the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS), another group trying to establish phone-specific Linux standards.

On the other hand, what’s most interesting is that Motorola is actually going to be a real open source company — like say an IBM and not like most of the companies using embedded Linux (such as TiVo or Linksys). Rather than testing the letter of the law as to the GPL and embedded Linux, Motorola has decided to comply with the spirit.

It has created its own portal where it hosts open source projects. One of the first things posted was the user interface for the Z6:

ROKR Z6 Open Source Components Released - ROKRZ6
Motorola is pleased to announce the release of the Open Source packages for the ROKR Z6 phone, as required by the terms of the GNU Public License. This release represents the first distribution of open source code used in our next generation Linux-Java mobile phone platform.
Guy Martin - 06/25/2007 2:17 PM CDT

As with any firm-sponsored open source effort, many questions remain, both about Motorola’s intentions for open source and how successful they will be.

Is Motorola just throwing the code over the wall, or does it expect to share development (and decision-making) with outside partners? Does it expect others to use the technology or is this merely just complying with the terms of the GPL (or being a good OSS corporate citizen)? Even though an open source implementation is the most open form of standardization, telling the world “this is an open standard” is unlikely to be enough.

Technorati Tags: embedded Linux, Linux, mobile phones, Motorola

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

Avoiding platform fragmentation

I'm going to continue posting regularly, but hope to do so with less time away from my day job. So bear with me as I try shorter posts.

One of the big problems that embedded Linux for mobile phones has right now is that it’s a technology, not a platform. Below is a slide from my presentation Monday at the DRUID conference on Apple’s iPhone strategy.

When I say “platform,” I mean in the sense of the seminal 1999 article by Bresnahan & Greenstein, or my own (far less influential) 2000 article with Jason Dedrick (which referred to a “standards architecture”, a terminology I no longer use). The leader in platform research is Anabelle Gawer of Imperial College London, who has spent pretty much her whole career since her 2000 MIT dissertation (on platforms) writing about platform issues, including the HBS book adapted from her dissertation.

At it turns out, I chatted with Anabelle last week at Imperial, we were presenting in the same session Monday evening, and chatted about platform issues at dinner (before devolving to more prosaic issues like how to raise a family on a professor’s salary in high-cost areas like London or Silicon Valley). (I used the same session and dinner to solicit other blog readers, like Hui YAN of Aalborg U.)

This morning, the near-solstice Danish sunlight woke me at 3:30 a.m. and I somehow never made it back to sleep. Trying to kill an hour (which turned into 3) I browsed through my RSS reader, and found an interesting article on LiPS, reacting to the same LiPS news I mentioned last week. Symbian developer Simon Judge believes that while allowing for vendor variation, LiPS will reduce the existing fragmentation of Linux on mobile.

Judge argued that the LiPS strategy of variation under standard APIs makes for a better platform than the Symbian strategy of variation on top of standard APIs:

The Symbian OS has evolved to push phone specific functionality (and unfortunately some non-specific) on top of the platform and this has resulted in UIQ, S60 and FOMA. These are not just UI variants but also include many extra internal and 3rd party APIs. Fragmentation is undesirable not only for developers but also for phone OEMs because they have to license extra software other than Symbian OS to create a new phone (or spend an inordinate amount of effort creating the missing components). …

If the LiPS extensibility scheme of pushing phone capability variations under rather than on top of the OS platform a) is workable and b) is adopted by phone OEMs, then it might actually prevent fragmentation.

In fact, Symbian OS is not a platform, it’s a shared technology that enables Nokia’s S60 and Sony Ericsson’s UIQ platforms. The fragmentation of the Symbian application APIs is unfortunate. Somewhere I read or heard that UIQ (which began as a cool pen-based UI) has more apps than S60, even though its installed base of S60 is 3x or 4x that of UIQ.

However, this is a painful reality of the political compromise that created Symbian as the anti-Windows Mobile coalition. When it was founded in 1998, (effectively as a Psion spinoff) Symbian actually tried to have a common UI and platform. Last month, I found a telling interview with Colly Myers, Symbian’s founding CEO. When asked what he would most want to do over as CEO, Myers replied:

We wouldn't have spent time on user interfaces. We'd have left that much earlier. Everyone was keen to share and we tried hard for two years, but it was never going to happen. Everything about those companies [phone OEMs] is based in their own UIs. So that was two years wasted.

In other words, Nokia and Sony Ericsson don’t want to end up like HTC (or Dell or Compaq) as nothing more than commodity distributors of someone else’s look and feel.

Unix (and now Linux) has had its own GUI wars. Back in the 1980s, MIT’s X allowed for the idea of common APIs but different look-and-feel, but (AFAIK) the APIs were incomplete — applications written for the various X-based GUIs (CDE, Motif, KDE, Gnome), are not binary compatible.

By joining GMAE LiPS has firmly sided with Gnome, and picking a single GUI is a good step towards defining a common platform. But then we’re back to Symbian’s dilemma — how do all the LiPS members distinguish their products with a common GUI?

Oops, this was supposed to be a shorter post. Maybe next time.

Technorati Tags: embedded Linux, mobile phones, platforms, standardization

Dueling Linux standards

My friend Bill Weinberg sent a link to a Linux Devices column about his work on the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum.

The column is interesting because it contrasts LiMo with LiPS more clearly than anything I’ve seen before.

Why do we need two standards bodies for embedded Linux for the handset? As with any other case of dueling consortia, it’s due to the egos of the sponsoring companies, in this case Europe’s two largest mobile phone carriers. LiMo is backed by Vodafone and LiPS is backed by Orange.

Would like to comment more, but time spent on blogging is already having a negative impact on my day job.

Technorati Tags: embedded Linux, Linux

GPLv3: Stallman’s “New Coke”

The storm over the Free Software Foundation’s proposed version 3 of the GPL has been brewing for several years, far longer than the 16 days this blog has been around. Driven by Richard Stallman’s desire to expand ““software freedom,”” the FSF’s proposed license changes have spawned various controversies over the anti-DRM clause, patent retaliation, license compatibility, and a more expansive definition of distribution. Even though the aggregation clause is an improvement, it retains deliberate ambiguities by avoiding standard legal terminology.

Most significantly, the new license has been criticized by Linus Torvalds and his lieutenants, mainly over the DRM issues. It is possible that Linux may not move to the new license, but instead accept patches only under a “GPL v2 or later” provision, since right now the leaders have absolute authority over what to accept. Certainly there is no requirement that existing GPLv2 packages switch to GPLv3; for example, MySQL has changed its terms so that it is not required to automatically update to the new license.

It seems clear that the GPL needs Linux more than the other way around. IMHO, the tremendous mindshare of the GPL has been due to its adoption by Linux rather than the other way around. One of my favorite open source books, the autobiographical Just for Fun (pp 96-97) makes it clear that the then 22-year-old Finnish college student picked the GPL as an afterthought in 1992 when he needed to have some way to distribute his increasingly popular operating system.

Andrew Morton and 9 other kernel maintainers said it best:

The current version (Discussion Draft 2) of GPLv3 on first reading fails the necessity test of section 1 on the grounds that there's no substantial and identified problem with GPLv2 that it is trying to solve.

On Friday, Bill Weinberg (of the late OSDL) wrote a detailed column about the issues he has seen in 7 years as an embedded Linux advocate, including how FSF thinking got us to this point. His conclusion:

The FSF role will shrink to marginal proportions, and GPLv3 will become, sadly, just another license.

Sounds a lot like “New Coke” to me.

Technorati Tags: embedded Linux, GPL, Linux, open source licenses

The GPL Won’t Solve This NIH Problem

I almost called this “NIH — Not Just for Programmers Anymore,” “Physiologists Who Need a GPL” or perhaps “Forking the Human Body.” The 1st choice is particularly fun because NIH has a double meaning, one for the IT sector and another for health care.

There was an interesting tale of forking at this week’s DCCI conference at the National Academies of Science and Engineering. The story was told by Brian Athey, a bioinformatics professor at the University of Michigan. Because his slides are not yet posted, I need to reconstruct the story from my sketchy notes.

Back in the early 1990s, the federal National Library of Medicine began its Visible Human Project. There’s a nice article at GE explaining how the various 3D imaging technologies (plus cadaver slices) were used to generate the dataset. (For the IT types, the GE study talks about using the big iron of the day — SGI dual 150 MHz screamers). As Athey told it, after the NLM had a virtual man (and then woman), everyone else wanted one, including DARPA with its Virtual Soldier, NASA with its Virtual Astronaut, and others I couldn’t type quickly enough. Even Ray Kurzweil wants to get involved.

If I understood his point, there’s a lot of re-inventing the wheel, everyone creating their own human by starting over from scratch, rather than doing cumulative innovation where one researcher builds upon (and contributes back to) the infrastructure created by others. BTW, if you go to NLM website, their license even has a form of reciprocity.

It’s yet another reminder to the GPLniks and others who believe that compulsory sharing is the answer to all the world’s problems. Take embedded Linux. Even if you can force people to share changes, that doesn’t mean that those changes will be used: it took several years to get essential embedded Linux features incorporated into the mainstream kernel. For more almost 15 years, the various BSD variants have been (without compulsion) sharing their respective code, but still pursuing separate projects — a canonical example of the exaggerated fear of forking held by many GPLniks.

Sometimes forking is justifiable, if, for example different efforts have irreconcilably different goals. A better choice than forking would be a modular design that allows meeting goals via incremental improvements rather than re-implementation (a pet peeve of mine as a software engineer and manager for more than 25 years). In other cases, “duplicative” investment harnesses competition as a way to choose the best solution from a range of possibilities.

But in many cases, it’s merely pride — i.e. NIH (Not Invented Here) — that leads to forking. Fortunately for medical research, the other NIH (National Institutes of Health) directly or indirectly fund the bulk share of U.S. public research. So if the NIH says “no” to NIH — and yes to cumulative innovation — then there’s hope for at least one sector to channel resources towards areas that do some good.

Technorati Tags: cumulative innovation, embedded Linux, GPL, infrastructure, medicine

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

Enforcing the GPL on Embedded Linux

Presumably by now everyone knows about the GPL and (depending on who you ask) its reciprocal aka “viral” properties. In the past, to avoid being a propagandist for either side I’ve called this “compulsory sharing” although the reality is that no shorthand description will make everyone happy.

To me, the remarkable thing has been how little enforcement there has been of the GPL on Linux (as opposed to dual license sponsored projects like MySQL). Maybe it's because those Linux proponents promoting Linux adoption don't want to discourage adoption. Or because of the legally unresolved question as to whether linking constitutes a derivative work. Or perhaps it’s because (for server and desktop use) there's the fig leaf of doing separate installs — shipping a CD with a Linux install and (say) a proprietary application, which are thus installed separately and thus the application doesn't fall under the “work based on the Program” clause of the GPLv2.

No such fig leaf exists if you have a WiFi router or a DVD player or a cellphone that uses embedded Linux. When I first started researching embedded Linux, one of the embedded BSD vendors argued that this made the more mature and non-GPL BSD operating system more suitable for embedded use.

This week Cisco admitted to violating the GPL on its iPhone (the one no one’s buying, not to be confused with the much-hyped Apple vaporware). They didn't volunteer it, but had to be prodded by someone who reverse-engineered the firmware and figured it out. This sort of GPL violation is probably pretty common, and obviously a big company like Cisco is an attractive target, but there were two interesting points. One is that the the inquisitive engineer was from the formal GPL Violations Project. The other was that the alleged violation was over Cisco not disclosing its own software, rather than over modifications to the Linux software (which would also be violations of the LGPL, MPL, EPL, etc. etc.).

Such disclosure of one’s own software is exactly the unresolved legal question that Larry Rosen (and others) have been pointing out with the Free Software Foundation's interpretation of “derivative work.” It could have huge implications for the many mobile phone manufacturers who are today shipping Linux-phones with unshared proprietary modifications.

If such enforcement becomes common, then it is going to change the nature of innovation in segments that use embedded Linux, forcing them to become more open in their innovation practices. Some would choose to make sharing a virtue and to actively collaborate, while others might decide the cost of sharing is not worth the incremental value of Linux over non-GPL alternatives. On the other hand, if the current regime of sporadic ad hoc enforcement continues, then it isn't going to serve as a deterrent for most vendors, and lots of little schlocky little companies are going to design business plans assuming they can fly under the radar and not get caught.

It would be helpful for all concerned if there a test case that told us what the law actually is. Of course, if the GPL were tested in a US court, it’s possible it could lose, which could account for the lack of a test case.