%0 Journal Article %J Open Source Business Resource %D 2009 %T The Arrival of the Mobile Internet Thanks to the Economics of Open Source Software %A Stephen R. Walli %X The promise of the mobile Internet has been long in coming. In 1992, then Apple CEO John Sculley was promising this "pocket-sized digital communicating devices" market would be "the mother of all markets", while Intel CEO Andrew Grove called it "a pipe dream driven by greed." Since then the mobile phone business has exploded, and personal digital assistants like the Palm Pilot have burst onto the scene. The launch of the RIM Blackberry brought a real email interface to the PDA world. The World Wide Web itself continues to grow enormously, with Netcraft's December 2008 survey receiving responses from 186,727,854 websites. We are just now arriving at a convergence in the market that is 16 years in the making. Handset and PDA manufacturers, mobile network operators, chip manufacturers, and computer platform hardware and software vendors all collide with the economics of the Web, collaborative development, and open source software. Indeed, we are seeing a point in history in which the mobile handset manufacturers and their partners are using open source software and collaborative development to ensure they do not get trapped in the narrow margin price war that caught the personal computer original equipment manufacturers in the previous technology wave. %B Open Source Business Resource %I Talent First Network %C Ottawa %8 01/2009 %G eng %U http://timreview.ca/article/221 %N January 2009 %9 Articles %1 Stephen R. Walli has been in the software industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor. He presently consults on open source, standards, and software business. His clients include Symbian, Microsoft, and the Eclipse and Linux Foundations. In 1995, he was a founder and vice-president, research and development at Softway Systems, a venture-backed startup that developed Interix to migrate UNIX applications to Windows NT based on the POSIX/UNIX standards he helped develop. Interix was Softway developed code, Microsoft licensed code, and a wealth of OSS covered by many licenses. Microsoft acquired Softway in 1999, where Stephen spent five years before joining another open source based start-up, Optaros, as vice-president, open source development strategy. He left Optaros in 2006 to pursue his own interests. Stephen organized the first Beijing Open Source Software Forum as part of the Software Innovation Summit 2007, and remains interested in OSS growth in China. He blogs at http://stephesblog.blogs.com.