Open Source and the Mobile Market (InfoWorld post)

This is a recent post that appeared on the InfoWorld blog "Open Sources by Dave Rosenberg and Matt Asay".

 

--- cut here --- cut here --- cut here --- cut here ---

 

We recently had the pleasure of hearing Dave rant about his mobile phone and BlackBerry death-spiral. Fortunately, he won't have to start rubbing sticks together to send out smoke signals any time soon - I promise.

RIM is starting to target the consumer space by inking deals with operators. The latest: Cingular in the U.S. In theory, this should make email easily integrated with cell phones... and RIM does have a pretty good email solution. Problem is, RIM's solution -- and their business model -- has depended on their proprietary hardware. They are stretching a device built just for the enterprise to adapt it to consumers. So far, only lowering the cost... That is not the way to do it. Consumers need a different type of device. Do you believe my father will ever use a QWERTY phone? I do not think so. However, he uses SMS today. And he receives emails on his desktop. One life, two separate worlds (mobile and web). I does not have to be that way. Good news: it is already changing.

How are RIM going to make their business work with all the phones from dozens of vendors in the consumer market? How do they extend functionality and interoperability to address this myriad of devices with proprietary software? They're smart enough to know that email is the killer app for mobile... reaching the mass market handsets (like your Razr) with email (or SmartSMS ;-) has nothing to do with being smart and everything to do with open source and open standards.

Open source software can do more for the mobile market than any other market it's disrupted to date. Why? Because there are 750 million phones in the world that are compatible with an open standard for PIM and, soon, mobile email (it is called SyncML). And because the only way to test all those phones (with the variations of software builds and network operators) is to harness the power of an open source community. The lousy customer service you were getting from the operators? Open source communities provide better support than that because of natural incentives for cooperation -- look how fast Linux fixes happen and the Linux device drivers history.

The trick is making sure operators "get" the idea of open source software as a real business value both on the cost and revenue side. It's not a religion or philosophy. We have some work to do but I know Dave can hang in there. Hold on -- we're nearly there. With open source and open standard your mobile life will change (and it will be finally integrated with your web life).

Is SyncML slow? Who cares ;-)

Last week another person asked me: "is SyncML slow?". This is a question I get often, due to a campaign launched by some that claim to have a proprietary protocol 20% faster than SyncML.

Let me start answering the question with a couple of questions:

1. Is HTML the best language to design pages? I do not think so... It is actually pretty bad and it was even worst at the beginning. Though, it is easy to read, and learn. And it is a standard. It created the Internet phenomenon that changed our lives. AJAX has been invented to go around it and kick off Web 2.0 (not sure what it is, but it appears to be a cool thing).

2. Is HTTP the best protocol to transmit data? I do not think so... It is actually fairly limited, not fast but easy to read and learn. And it is a standard. Millions of users use it every day.

Now, what about SyncML? Well, it is based on XML. It has some overhead. That makes it easy to read and learn, exactly as HTML and HTTP. Is it a standard? You bet. It is installed today on some 700 millions devices.

Just because of it, I am starting to feel better about that 20% difference. I would go with an open standard over a proprietary standard any day. I would bet Stefano could write a protocol 20% faster than HTTP overnight. Unfortunately, it would not be likely that 700M people would use it. So we stick with the standard as we did in 1994, when we decided to go with HTML and HTTP.

One more thing about SyncML and, in particular, version 1.2 with push email: this is not browsing. You are not waiting for a page to download. You hear beep when your email is already on your device. The 20% difference means you will hear beep a few milliseconds before me. Big deal. SyncML might be slower than a proprietary protocol, but it is easy to read and learn, it is a standard available on almost every device on the planet and you do not even notice the difference in speed. Who cares about proprietary protocols? I certainly don't.

 

500,000 downloads

This morning I checked on the ObjectWeb website the official number of downloads of the Funambol project and I saw we passed 500,000. Wow. Half a million downloads. Sometimes it is hard to believe even for me. In particular, when I see that more than half of them came in this year alone (and we have been alive and kicking since 2001...). The power of the community, a sign of good timing and a testament of mobile open source being the next big thing: I really believe we'll be the engine of the mobile Internet. Scary ;-)

ActiveSync, SyncML and the evil empire

I have always admired Microsoft. I guess I am one of the few open source people with sincere admiration for Microsoft. Not really for the quality of their software (you need open source for that), but because they have been able to hold on a cash cow while they could afford to make a lot of mistakes to find the new revenue stream. When they have been successful, they have made it with a Trojan horse.

What is the last success of Microsoft? I would say Internet Explorer. It was ten years ago. And it was free (as in beer) software. Mediocre quality, never improved for lack of competition (now it is coming, so they are moving again). But it was its Trojan horse to control the web. And they still control it (even if Google is putting up a good fight).

The cash cow are Windows, Office and Exchange. Period. Enough to create a monopoly of insane magnitude.

What's next? Mobile, of course. There is a paradigm shift to mobile, they cannot miss it.

What is their Trojan horse there? ActiveSync. Forget about Windows Mobile, they know they will not be able to control the mobile OS market, as they did with the desktop market. They tried with the server market and failed. Nobody will allow them to succeed in it. I heard a nice story once: "I told my daughter not to use the hammer because she could get hurt. She used anyway. She got hurt. She cried. She came back and said she won't do it again. I know she won't." Mobile device manufacturer will not allow Microsoft to do what they did to PC manufacturers.

So... why ActiveSync? Because it is the link between the mobile and the fixed world. It is the glue that ties the two worlds, which cannot live separately. Because data synchronization is for mobile what the browser is for the Internet.

On ActiveSync, you move your PIM data (contacts, calendar, etc.), you do messaging (Pocket Outlook), you move files, you move applications, you develop the new crop of mobile software. Applications will be resident on devices. ActiveSync is the trick that Microsoft is using to power the mobile Internet, based on mobile widgets.

ActiveSync is not only on Windows Mobile devices. They are licensing it around like crazy. Symbian has licensed it. Nokia has licensed it. It is on Palm. They are playing with the hammer in their hands...

How good is ActiveSync? Mediocre, as usual. It has been built for desktop synchronization over serial and USB. They extended it to over-the-air synchronization but it was not built for it. It is ugly. The Microsoft Direct Push technology is even worse. It drains the battery on the device and requires an IT Manager to expose Exchange on the Internet. Though, it is getting everywhere. Monopolies have some power.

Now, who is fighting ActiveSync? Is Sun doing it? Is Google doing it? Is IBM doing it? Is Red Hat doing it? Is Oracle doing it? Nope. They haven't seen it coming. The only alternative in the market is SyncML, an open standard by the Open Mobile Alliance. It is installed on 700 million phones, 80% of the devices sold last year. It does what ActiveSync does and much better (built for over-the-air sync from day one). It is a grass root movement, probably also because of Funambol with our huge community and our 500,000 downloads. It is a phenomenal success. We are fighting the evil empire on its new battle. We discovered the Trojan horse. We are pointing to it. However, we do not have the marketing power of Microsoft... I guess we could use some help ;-)

Do not let ActiveSync get into your network...It is the new Trojan horse of the evil empire. Go with SyncML. Do not let them lock you in once again. Man, they are good!!

Funambol named a Red Herring 100 company

Pretty cool news today. We have been named one of the top "100 Private North American Firms Driving the Future of Technology" by Red Herring. Looking at the list, I am very glad to be in with Sling Media, Zimbra, Jajah and Mozilla. Red Herring claims they picked Google and eBay in the past and they are good at this: let's hope they are right :-)

One thing I noticed on the list: there is a pretty good amount of companies building solution around open source. Together wth Funambol, there is Zimbra, Pentaho, EnterpriseDB, Mozilla, BlackDuck, Collabnet. Probably even more that I never heard about. Or at least, I would guess that 99 out of 100 are using open source software. I should put a prize up for the person who finds the one not using open source...

My 2c on Sun, Java and (mobile) open source

JavaOne is in town. Everybody is excited about the announcement that Java will be open source. "It is not a matter of if, just how", said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun new CEO. I actually feel "when" matters even more than "if and how" these days, but that's a different story and many are writing about it ;-)

When I look at Sun, I see a big hole. They have the greatest tool of all time (Java), both on the server side (JavaEE) and the mobile side (JavaME). The JavaEE application servers are the backbone of the Internet. JavaME commands a 60% market on the device side. That's a lot of devices, considering we are close to sell one billion a year. Sun is potentially the Microsoft of both backend infrastructure and mobile. Sadly, they are not... Where is the hole? There is nothing in their product line to get data from a JavaEE server and put it on a JavaME device. Nothing that makes JavaME really useful and bridges it with the world of the JavaEE application servers.

Forget Java open source, this is way more interesting. You own two markets and you do not take advantage of that.  This is juicy stuff.

Obviously, I am biased. Funambol is the missing link in the Sun product offering. We have a JavaEE backend and we move data to JavaME devices. One day, someone called our product a J2ME server. I found it bizarre then, but it makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. Without data, a J2ME app is close to useless. If the future is in mobile widgets, as I believe, you need to pump data to a JavaME app. We have it all, we can get everything from a JavaEE server to a JavaME app. Funambol is the mobile open source application server with the largest mobile development community. We can make the strategy of Sun a reality... Scary, we can help them become Microsoft :-)

Anyway, I love Sun. I always did. I was one of the dumb people that developed code with Java alpha back at HP Labs. That screamed when beta came out and had nothing to do with alpha... I sold Sun boxes in Italy and I was heavily involved in an agreement with Sun while at Reuters, when we were selling E10K to financial institutions like they were lollipops (good old 2000 :-)

I heard Jonathan Schwartz for the first time at JavaOne, back in 2002 (I guess, I am getting old...). I was in a room for a press conference, faking to be a journalist since I had a monthly column on a wireless magazine. Scott McNealy was silent, Jonathan was doing all the talking. Crisp vision, great message. I thought: "this guy with the ponytail will be the next CEO, he is too good". I rooted for him since that day. It took him some years and he made it. Give him some time and he will figure out the hole. I just hope he will give me a call to plug it :-)

WAP client or mobile widget?

The talk before mine at MobileMonday Global Summit was given by Christian Lindholm, a VP in Mobile at Yahoo. I met Christian a year ago in Helsinki for the first time, when he was still working at Nokia on Lifeblog (a very cool product, using SyncML). He then moved to Yahoo and is coming to live in the Bay Area, the coolest place on earth when the weather is good.

His talk was full of Yahoo!, but still interesting. In particular, he outlined Yahoo plans to bring to mobile phones the Soccer World Cup (the most watched sport event on the planet). They are going to have a WAP site and a J2ME app. The Java app will include live stream of results, but looked less rich in content. It is targeted to the hard-core fan.

As you might know, at Funambol we built a mobile World Cup application in 2002. Built for Palm OS, it allowed people to get updates on scores and standings, while HotSyncing. It was a phenomenal success and our first large deployment of Sync4j. It was a fat client, obviously. Today, I would call it a mobile widget.

I find the decision of Yahoo to build a WAP site quite interesting. They have a fat client (collection of widgets) for the Yahoo experience, but they still decided to go with WAP in this case. We all know browsing on a mobile phone sucks. However, when you have a ton of content ready, going with WAP makes your life much easier. You can transcode or use mobile CSS. I suspect this was their main reason (the other one was serving the non-J2ME market, which is still a good chunk of the market, but they could have chosen to build separate clients for Brew, Windows Mobile and PalmOS).

They built a mobile widget with J2ME. I would bet the Funambol server I am delivering to Alfresco that the user experience on that client will be much better. Real time updates being one reason. Local storage of results, instead of download at every click, being the other reason. Instant access to content, without the need of downloading it from the web. However, they might not have spent the necessary amount of time to build a proper app, since it is not an easy task.

The tradeoff between a WAP client or a mobile widget is clear. One is easy to develop, only requires to adapt existing web content easily but delivers a horrible user experience. The other one is harder to develop, requires a way to import pieces of existing web content (easy to do, if the web content is well designed...) but can deliver a great user experience.

My feeling is that company will try to go for the easy route. We will have tons of seldom-used mobile web content. At the end, the companies that will make it in mobile will be the ones that will take the time to build widgets and deliver a great experience (not WAP crap). Google and Yahoo started big in this category. All the others will follow. Stay tuned, it is going to happen fast.

Entiva Group report on Funambol

Entiva Group has recently published a report on Funambol. It is very nice. If I were not the CEO of Funambol, I would guess Funambol paid them to write it. We did not. It is totally independent. They really wrote what they think about the mobile open source company. Looking at the conclusions, obviously I totally subscribe to what they say :-)

MobileMonday Global Summit

I am in Helsinki today, speaking at the MobileMonday Global Summit about how open source changes the game in mobile email. Very interesting crowd. Very international. I keep picking up a very good vibe, every time I am at a mobile conference. We had some tough years, but we have definitely turned the corner.

Russ and Mike are not here, though there is a picture of them on the wall... I guess I am representing the Silicon Valley MobileMonday and I am doing my best. But it is not the same thing without them...

Italians do IT better

I am speaking at an interesting event in Italy today. We are talking about University and Entrepreneurship. Carlo De Benedetti, formerly CEO of Olivetti, is giving the keynote. We are discussing about education and how to apply what you learn, in order to create a great company.

Italy is a great country. Not just for art, food and fashion. We had and have great minds, but we are missing the attitude to use them to export our technology. Ferrari being an exception (that's actually the best example of great Italian fashion and fantastic technology combined). I started Funambol to create another exception, exporting Italian software to the world. Software is creativity. That's the best characteristic of Italians. The problem has always been how to distribute it worldwide. Open source is the answer. Open source destroys any barrier for distribution. It allows European software to show its competence in software, for the first time in history (SAP excluded).

Think about Open Source. Linus is Finnish. MySQL is Swedish. Marc Fleury (JBoss founder) is French. SUSE was German. Funambol started in Italy. The best open source stories are European. Then we all moved to the US to create commercial open source companies. But this is a different story. The technology started in Europe and open source allowed us to distribute it worldwide and make it known.

Open source also contributes to dispel myths and legends (a.k.a. common sense). I heard once a person say about his public company in the Valley: "we have an Italian CTO, it is like having a German chef" (two countries insulted in one sentence ;-) I better do not talk about German food, but the great thing about open source is that the code is out there. Everybody can see it. If it is good, people use it. If it sucks, nobody uses it. Funambol has been downloaded half a million times. It has to be good. Italians must be good at software and IT, after all.

My next t-shirt is going to have "Italians do IT better" on the front. If you work in IT and have an Italian ancestor, give me a buzz and I will send you one. Girls might look at you and think you are not just a geek :-)

Free time-shifted mobile TV rocks!

I have never been a fan of mobile television. My friend Russell Beattie (BTW, please Russ go back blogging, we miss you) has been telling me it is going to be big, showing me these videos on a cramped screen. My answer has always been "if I can't see the ball in a soccer game, I am not interested". Also, when do I have the time to watch TV on my mobile device (I do not live in Japan, I do not commute with a train)? Would I ever watch TV sitting on something different than my couch? Why would I pay for that?

Now, I slightly changed my mind... I am still not a believer in paying for getting my TV on my mobile. But if it is free... I guess I could find five minutes of my life, while sitting in my car and waiting for my next meeting, to watch something.

That "something" is the key. I still do not believe in live TV. If an event is live, you have to tune in when it starts and leave when it ends. If I had the luxury to do it, I would do it sitting on my couch like a potato. The key is time-shifted mobile TV. That is TiVo on my mobile. Watching something I recorded before, when I have those five minutes.

So... now I am a believer in free time-shifted mobile TV.

Why is simple: my friend Brian, Product Manager at SlingMedia, sent me a SlingBox. It is a hardware device that streams your TV over the Internet. No subscription. Buy the box (or get a friend to send you one ;-) and you are good for life. You can watch live TV (or your TiVo or any other DVR or a real-time video from a camera overlooking your child's room) from your computer, where you install the SlingPlayer. The quality of the signal on the PC is incredible. Still, there is no couch in my office...

SlingMedia has also a player for Windows Mobile (version 1.0 is out this morning). If you have a data plan - as in my Verizon Treo 700w - you can watch your time-shifted TV on your mobile phone. You just need a data plan, that I have anyway to get my Funambol push email.

For free. I get to watch the Champions League on my cell. Just the highlights. Just five minutes. When I have them. I can barely see the ball, but I see it. The quality is good enough. I love it. Free time-shifted mobile TV rocks!

Once you have something cool in your hands and you are a geek, you also start coming up with stupid way to use it. On Saturday, my daughter woke up early as usual (anybody has a tip on how can you teach a kid the difference between weekdays and weekends?). She wanted to see Dragon Tales. I got out of bed, went downstairs, fired Tivo. While walking upstairs to get back into bed, I grabbed my Treo. Half an hour later, Lisa shouted "Now I want to see Plaza Sesamo!" (the spanish version of Sesame Street). I took my Treo, clicked on it and started Plaza Sesamo from my bed. She shouted "Daddy, it started by itself!". I went back to sleep. Better than laying on my couch.

SlingMedia is the best thing that happened to television after TiVo. Go out and grab one as soon as you can. If Big Brother can prove streaming = copying, they will be shut down fast (I really hope not :-) But you will still have your SlingBox... Do not wait a minute.

About convergence and getting your MySQL data on your mobile device

When we started Funambol, back in 2002, our idea was to create an infrastucture to distribute data between mobile devices.

I never believed in the convergence of everything in one single great device. I just got a new one this week and I am very happy about it. I do think that single specialized device do better than multi-purpose tools. Granted, I used the swiss knife in emergencies. But it is not my everyday tool. I do not really believe my MP3 player, my DVD player, my cellphone, my camera and my laptop will converge one day, just because it bothers me to bring them all with me.

I would love a converged device the keep my money and my keys in one place, though I still have a wallet and a separate keychain. I believe I will always have both (until ALL my doors will open thanks to biometric authentication).

So... I believe in divergence. I believe in multiple devices doing one thing very well. Something is certain, though: the data on all the devices will overlap. You will have your address book in Outlook, on your RAZR, on your Blackberry, in your car, on your home phone. It is the same address book, with some segmentation (I do not care to have my entire company address book on my home phone). The same for music, video and so on. Everything is shared between all your devices.

If the data is shared, it must be synchronized. If I change a phone number in Outlook, it must change on my cell. And vice versa. I do not have to do it twice or it is game over.

Hence, we created Funambol as an open standard synchronization engine. Synchronization will be a basic commodity powering the next computing shift towards mobile. Open source is the best way to address a commodity. So... we are golden :-)

That said, where is the data stored in open source? In a MySQL database. How do you get it out of there and put on a mobile device is a question a lot of people are asking (at least, they ask me ;-) The answer is in my speech at MySQL User Conference, next Tuesday April 25th, at 5:20 pm in Santa Clara (BYOB, bring your own beer because you are going to be tired).

The title is "Synchronizing MySQL-based Applications with Mobile Devices". The content will include a description of our cool tutorial "Creating J2ME Applications with Sync4j 2.3, MySQL, and Eclipse".

I'll see you there.

V3 beta 3 is out: a WAP Mail Server is in

Good news from our product team this week: they released the third beta of Funambol v3.

It includes some updated modules: DS Server, Windows Mobile Client Plug-in, Client API for C++, Admin Tool for Windows/Linux.

It also includes a brand new module: a WAP Mail Server. It comes from my quest to distribute great Italian software to the world. It has been contributed by Comvalid, the US counterpart of Inrete.

Our WAP Mail server allows anybody with a WAP broser (that's almost 100% of cell phones out there) to access its email (POP or IMAP). There is no push, for that you have to use the other modules of our product.

The WAP Server is of a very high quality and it is capable of doing things that Gmail Mobile is just dreaming of. For example, the way we manage attachments is really cool. Powerpoint slides are converted in jpgs, that you can browse with a click (page by page), with the ability of zooming into the slide. Granted, you are going to need a powerpoint on your cell only once a quarter. But when you need it, you'll see how important it is to have it.

I am very glad we got this release out. It is a great step. The next one should come around the end of May. With that, we'll release the first version of the Enterprise package. It is going to be interesting.

How much open is dual licensing?

While on the slopes, I had time to think. There is an interesting discussion going on in our mailing list, about how open Funambol is. I mean, we are obviously open source. But are we really an open project? That is an interesting question, valid for every open source project but more so for dual licensing projects.

Is Linux really open? Can you contribute to the core if you want? Yes, but there is a benevolent dictator that will allow you to do it or not. So... you can, but... Well, maybe Linux is not really open. It is close, but you have to demonstrate to be good and the doors of paradise will open up for you.

What about dual licensing projects? We also have a benevolent dictator (in our case, it is Stefano). The difference is that his motives might also be linked to commercial goals. The community might not have full visibility of those motives and feel we have a evil purpose.

To avoid looking "close", you have to be very open on your goals and define what you do for the project and what the community should do. It is called a Social Contract. We published the Funambol Social Contract some time ago. It sets the rules. It is a forever-changing document that adapts to the community input. It is a crucial document.

Dual licensing is always at risk not to look open. Sometimes people forget that open source does not mean chaos and random development. The good open source project (including Linux) have a rigid organization. It is the only way to build good quality software. The same is for dual licensing open source projects. If you are running one or you are thinking about starting one, my suggestion is to make sure you sign a contract with your community. Make your process open and you will end up being as open as any open source project. Keep your process close and your community will leave you. It is a tight-rope walk. Every single day.

We are half a way there...

I spent a few days in Deer Valley, near Park City (Utah). Amazing spring skiing. For someone who grew up in the Alps, fifteen minutes to the slopes, it feels weird to take a flight to go skiing. But it was worth it.

Anyway, I paid half of my bet. I skied with the crappy Arsenal jearsey for three days in a row. So many people made fun of me... Even Kenny G, who told me "next time bet that you won't have an haircut forever, and you'll end up like me". Matt showed up only for lunch and not skiing, claiming he had three kids sick, while in reality he was busy preparing the sunscreen to leave for Costarica.

Anyway, with respect to the bet I lost, I am half a way there (as Rony uses to say). I'll have to deliver the Funambol server to Alfresco, but I will wait for the Enterprise version of v3, due in the next few weeks.

Small question for my US friends: why do Americans only use green, blue and black to label runs? In Europe we have also red, which means quite difficult (but not black). Instead, here they have blue with two squares... Was red not politically correct and they decided not to import it?

Open source my ass?

I love open source. I love the community. You put together a large group of very smart guys and you can get anywhere. I am sure we'll change the mobile market forever with Funambol, because when you have so many brains working together... you'll end up creating something great.

Unfortunately, having so many smart people sometimes fires back ;-) Today, I spent some of my cycles on thinking about an email in our mailing list, titled "Open source my ass". I love the title and the content was really interesting. It was all about the tight-rope walk we are trying to do with Funambol. It goes down to what is "free" and what you have to pay for. As usual, people forget that open source means open, not free. But that is a different story I will leave to the smart brains behind the concepts.

In this case, the discussion was about support. Free support (from the mailing list) vs. paid support (to Funambol). If you really want to create a community, you need to help people to start working on your stuff. However, where do you stop? Where do you set the line and start telling people "hey, you have to pay for this"?

If Funambol people answer all the questions, the community will be developed around lurkers, just waiting for a cooked meal. Nobody will step up to the plate and say "I know the answer, here it is" because you'll know someone from Funambol will answer. That will be unhealthy. That is not a community. It is a commercial company giving away some free code to convince people to buy. That is not what I want the Funambol project to be. This is not how we change the rules in mobile.

I asked my team (reinforcing it today) to be more involved in answering to the community. But they have to do it in their spare time (if they have some ;-) 15 minutes a day. No more. It is 35 people growing fast, so it is a good amount of man hours...

Now, where do we put the line? If a question requires more than 15 minutes for an answer, does it make sense for someone in our team to do it in its spare time? Or does it land you in "you are asking too much, so you probably do not have enough time to do it yourself and maybe you could pay for it, so we get your money and put it back in the project"? What is too much? How do you quantify it? What should the metric be?

I do not know. I am throwing the 15-minutes-a-day rule out and see if it works. We'll find it out soon. That's the beauty of open source. That's the beauty of a community of smart guys. If it is not going to work, I'll get a "15 minutes my ass" email and I'll change it until I get it right.

I love open source.

Lost my bet :-(

I hate Matt. Juventus was kicked out of the Champions League. Arsenal is in the semifinal. I should have never started this blog. I jinxed it.

I tried to recover in Vegas. Made few bets on the roulette with Daniele. He lost. I won. But he cheers for Inter Milan and he is used to losing. I am not. Juventus always wins. I hate losing :-)

I hate you Matt. I'll see you next week in Utah. Let me know where to buy the Arsenal jersey. I am going to wear it while skiing.

Does LinuxWord Conference still make sense?

I came off a long week, flying to Boston to speak at LinuxWorld, then to Las Vegas for CTIA, where we had a booth.

It felt strange. I am open source guy, but I felt uneasy at LinuxWorld. I just could not understand the reason for people to be there. Linux is cool, but does a new kernel release justify a conference (and more than one)? Traffic seemed slow at LinuxWorld. People looked bored.

On the other side, as the mobile open source company we draw huge crowds at CTIA. Everybody was excited about open source (in mobile). Interest. Excitement. I did not find that at LinuxWorld. Ok, maybe Vegas is more exciting than Boston. But it was not just that.

I am starting to feel LinuxWorld does not make sense anymore. I reminds me of that winter in 1995 when I flew to the same place (Boston) for the third World Wide Web conference (man, it was cold!!). Back then, I started feeling a conference about the web was useless, because the web was becoming mainstream.

Open source is becoming mainstream, the risk for it to become boring is significant. Let's spread out open source in vertical conferences and keep the excitement up. Let's shut down LinuxWorld and then OSBC in a year or so (open source and business is still somewhat interesting, but it will get boring soon, and there are too many OSBC Conferences). If we really want to do something in open source, let's create a Mobile Linux conference. I know I am biased, but the mobile track was quite interesting (and we had a fire alarm evacuation in the middle of my speech, which was exciting ;-)

LinuxWorld: mobile is here!

There is a new thing at LinuxWorld in Boston: mobile. It took us a little bit, but open source finally hit mobile. Big time. And LinuxWorld is recognizing it.

So much that one of the four tracks this year is Mobile and Embedded Linux. The big guys are here to talk about mobile Linux: Motorola will speak, Nokia will speak. Montavista and PalmSource (yep, they are open source buddies now) will also speak. Mobile Linux is really hot.

Funny enough, I am the only guy speaking about mobile applications and not the OS. Great to see we are ahead of the pack. I am not sure why they put my speech to open the track, before anybody else, but I take it as a compliment.

If you are in Boston next week, "It's Not Rocket Science: Open Source Makes Mobile Email Real" is at 10:15 am on Tuesday. I'll be landing on Monday night, be around all day on Tuesday to then fly to Vegas for CTIA. Give me a buzz if you are around and want to talk.

Karting is addictive for open source people

I just got this picture from Rony. It is a portion of the Funambol team in the US after the traditional go-kart race. Unfortunately, only men showed up. Otherwise, it would have been much more interesting.

Just to make sure Alberto does not forget the final result, here you find a copy.