01653nas a2200121   4500008004100000022001400041245009900055210006900154260004200223520120400265100002601469856003601495       2010                        eng d  a1913-610200aOpen is the New Closed: How the Mobile Industry uses Open Source to Further Commercial Agendas0 aOpen is the New Closed How the Mobile Industry uses Open Source   aOttawabTalent First Networkc03/20103 aOpenness is a much-misunderstood word. It represents a kind of good-will moniker to which people attach an impressive variety of definitions: open source code, open standards, open handsets, openness as in transparency, shared roadmaps, open application programming interfaces (APIs), open route to market, and so on. It is a very forgiving term as far as definitions go.

One of the mobile industry's favourite facets of openness is open source code. Since 2007, tens of mobile industry giants and consortia have embraced open source in some form or other: the Symbian Foundation, LiMo Foundation, Google's Android, Nokia's Qt, Apple's WebKit and Nokia+Intel's Meego are the initiatives that have hit the industry front pages. On the surface, these initiatives use open source licenses, but that only tells half the story. Behind the scenes, Google, Apple, Nokia and others use restrictive governance models and control points that effectively detract the very freedoms that open source licensing is meant to bestow. This discusses the many forms that governance models can take, and how they are used in the mobile industry to tightly control the roadmap and application of open source projects.1 aConstantinou, Andreas  uhttp://timreview.ca/article/330