Whose mobile open source community will deliver?

[Administrator]

In all the talk of the various approaches to building mobile open source platforms one word has been left out.

Community.

One of the key lessons open source companies have learned over the last few years is that it’s the quality of your development community which determines your success.

Yet I look at Android and I see Google going it alone. I look at the LiMo Foundation and it’s a corporate billboard.

This is a mistake, both on the part of the companies involved and on the part of the industry. If mobile Linux is to really take off, then a development community must be activated.

This week Funambol made the first move to do just that with the launch of its Funambol Forge.

The new forge has many of the tools you look for in a good community site. The question is whether it will attract mobile developers generally, or just those who care about Funambol’s own software.

I know that corporate-owned forges are usually devoted toÂ*a corporation’s own software, but it may be time for that to change.

If other mobile projects won’t develop high-quality forges with good community tools, why shouldn’t Funambol Forge become the center of the action?

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