Can you tell us more about the LiMo Foundation?
The LiMo Foundation is a not for profit consortium founded in January 2007 by Motorola, NEC, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung and Vodafone with the aim of creating an open Linux-based software platform through a balanced and transparent contribution process enabling a rich ecosystem of differentiated products. Within 2 years, The Foundation has made considerable headway – increasing its membership from 6 to more than 50 members, representing nearly one billion mobile subscribers globally through its 11 operator members, shipping 33 commercial handset models and completing the second release of its platform.
The guiding principles that underpin the Foundation include an open, inclusive and independent governance model, an equitable and balanced collaboration model, abstention from brand and business model conflicts as well as a strong IPR protection.
What are LiMo’s objectives regarding developers?
LiMo is keen to nurture and empower an ecosystem of developers that can develop innovative applications on LiMo handsets. LiMo provides developers with a stable, robust platform that targets a broad device market – 33 commercial handsets have already been deployed while LiMo OEMs and operator members have announced plans to deploy a wider range of LiMo phones in 2009.
LiMo also provides developers with an unrivalled market opportunity with 11 member operators representing nearly 1 Billion subscribers globally. Furthermore, LiMo’s APIs are published on our website and are freely available to developers for download. Four of LiMo’s members have demonstrated SDKs at MWC 2009 and these will be made available to developers later this year. By abstracting at the User Interface and User Experience layer, the LiMo platform encourages innovation on top of the middleware.
Whilst the core of the platform is licensed under the Foundation Public License, there is provisioning for fee-bearing proprietary code in order to align with developers’ existing business models. By endorsing OMTP’s BONDI specifications, LiMo has also made it easier for the millions of web developers from the PC world to run their applications and widgets seamlessly across LiMo handsets.
Why is LiMo building a new mobile platform?
The mobile industry has so far been blocked by legacy value systems. Most mobile devices and services have been operator-specific, i.e. tailored to the unique environments of particular mobile operators. This has resulted in dozens of proprietary operating systems, rendering application development across different handsets and networks both tedious and costly and, in turn, hindering innovation and market growth.
The industry realized that, in order to provide demanding customers with a more compelling and differentiated next-generation mobile experience, unification is required around two or three global platforms. Therefore, a group of industry leaders, inspired by the open-source principles of code sharing and transparent governance, came together to create a common, neutral and collaboratively developed middleware platform.
What are LiMo’s global plans for 2009/2010?
2009/2010 will be an exciting period for LiMo which will see the Foundation make giant strides in the Mobile OS market. We have already announced the completion of contributions for the R2 platform. We will now move swiftly to the testing and integration phase so that our members can start shipping LiMo based phones in H2 of 2009. Many of these LiMo handsets will support the BONDI specification. We will publish the APIs for the R2 platform and our members will make available SDKs so that 3rd party developers can start writing applications for LiMo handsets.
The Foundation will continue to grow in strength with some big industry names expected to join in the coming months. The LiMo platform itself will continue to develop and mature, reflecting the current technological trends and state of the art contributions from our innovative members