Open Source Software Up the Stack

I read recently that Volantis Systems, a half-decade-old supplier of content management software specific to mobile devices, was releasing some of its most important software under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3). That seemed interesting because my research has found that often when a company moves from more commercial terms and conditions (Ts&Cs) to open source software (OSS) Ts&Cs, it’s because the company is having some marketing or development issues. But that did not appear to be the case for Volantis which has built up its customer base pretty consistently since 2002 and includes AAA, AT&T, BEA, CBS, FT, IBM, MTN (South Africa) and even the WWE—to drop a few letters—among its client/partner roster.

I wanted to hear about its OSS motivation so this morning I caught up with Mark Watson, CEO of the UK-heritage Volantis, as he was passing through Waterloo Station. As a result I got some interesting OSS content about the mobile market from the mobile content guy while he was mobile.

Prior to co-founding Volantis, Mark spent 15 years at IBM in a variety of positions, including research and development, sales, and management. Mark was Volantis' CTO from the company's inception in 2000 until his move to CEO this June. Volantis Systems products include framework middleware for delivering mobile content to more than 250 million mobile phone users worldwide, and a set of related applications that sit on the framework performing such functions as content acquisition, feed management, rich media support and real-time wireless application protocol (WAP) conversion.

It is the framework middleware that is being re-introduced under the GNU v3 in January 2008. So why? "Our view is that the development of the mobile Internet is being held back by lack of access, for enterprises and developers, to the right (development) software – software… which can scale to support sites and applications as they become successful, across the market and across the world,” said Mark. OSS it turns out is a great way to move fast if content providers and purveyors have the right base to work from. None of them want to re-invent the underlying infrastructure because it is the content and/or the network that is their differentiation. As I have written elsewhere (see the third point at this link), that is exactly the phenomenon I expect to kick in if the thousands of services needed to make services oriented architecture (SOA) a success are going to materialize.

In its OSS version, the framework is called the Volantis Mobility Server. Volantis might squander any goodwill with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) gained from choosing GPL v3 when the FSF sees the list of patents accompanying Volantis' press release. But as Mark pointed out, Volantis probably “spent more” on legal issues than engineering issues in making this strategic change in direction to OSS. That's an OSS culture issue that needs some work if OSS Ts&Cs are going to become as prevalent as I believe they will be over the next decade. Traditional Ts&Cs will still be used for Volantis’ established customer base, which includes leading telecommunications providers and software partners such as IBM (Volantis is the WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal Enabler). And Mark has already found some prospects that would like OSS but not some of the “free as in air” restrictions of the GPL. Mark is willing to be flexible and find another Open Source Initiative approved OSS license structure.

Volantis is a long-time user of Linux, Tomcat, MySQL, PostGRES and other OSS technology and primarily gives back to the community via participation in standards bodies. The company primarily hopes its community will build the applications needed to spark more use of mobile Internet capability; it gets pretty heavy quality control already from its telecom users. In addition to releasing the code, Volantis will also host its own forge starting in January.

A major trend that Mark sees accelerating such development by the community is the ease of combining web applications with desktop features in the emerging AJAX-based markup paradigm that is replacing traditional Java programming in the mobile content space. He notes the buzz around the recent Google Android announcement as well.