OSiM Observations Day 2 -September 17th

By Robert Kempf
It was good to see that the initial Sales pitch in the Day 1 talks was not visible anymore on Day 2 at OSiM, but that rather the key topic “Open Source in Mobile” was the focus again.

The presentation from Samsung on how they handle this transition phase from working in a rather closed environment towards using OSS was a good example. A very honest description of the challenges a company phases in this transition and an encouraging outlook for those who are going along the same path.

There were also quite some statements on having too many open source platforms coming up and the potential need to go one step back to see whether there can’t be a unique platform as a common base at least in the Linux space – but to be honest I doubt that anyone speaking about this idea will really invest in making this happen short term.

A very inspiring part of OSiM today were the WIPJam sessions. These 40min open discussions around a specific topic with a very diverse audience were great fun. Having open source freaks, entrepreneurs, senior management people from large companies and people who want to learn about this topic and are more kind of the end-user-type around the same table leads to a very unpredictable but exciting discussion on a topic and gives you new ideas of what could be done. It did also show the very different view of how to interpret benefit and innovation – especially in this area the view of the technical experts and the end-user-type participant were quite different.

It was well worth participating in OSiM 2009, meeting people you haven’t seen for some time, getting new ideas about where open source in mobile will go and seeing the ever increasing momemtum of OSS in the mobile industry.