OSiM

["Stormy Peters" <stormy gnome org>]

This was my first year at OSiM (Open Source in Mobile) Conference so I thought I'd share my thoughts. I'd be interested in hearing what others thought.

• It was more of a business conference than a developer's conference. It was more like OSBC than OSCON. The number one sign of this is the paid internet and lack of power outlets. (So I didn't twitter or blog it - which is why I'm writing this.) I also think there's an opportunity here for a more developer focused conference - I'm thinking a mobile track at GUADEC might go over well.
• The keynotes were very company and product focused. (If you happen to get one of these slots, I'd suggest *not* starting with a slide that says "History of Company XYZ" followed by a bunch of bullet points. (The exception to this was Google. Their talk was all about Android and people were really interested.)
• There were lots of questions about Google Android and how open it really was. I took the questions to mean that the audience was skeptical that Google really was open. But they were still really interested in it.
• 100% mobile phone penetration in Europe. Wow – I still know plenty of people in the US without cell phones.
• The level of sponsorship didn't seem to correspond to size of company or market precense. (Or I don't know this market well enough.) It went, from most to least sponsorship: Access, Azingo, Wind River, Nokia and Intel, Ericsson, Limo Foundation and then Qualcomm. Anybody have any insight into that?
• There was a combination of people who knew open source well and people that didn't know open source at all. I think it was mostly people from the operator companies that didn't know open source. I sat next to a couple of guys at lunch that didn't know what GNOME was and were not Linux users. I think we need to have or contribute to messaging targeted at operators. I think they will end up doing more software development in the future.
  
• I liked the Tmobile guy's response. When asked if it was true they'd be the first US carrier to carry Android, he said, "I can't comment on that, but in the next two weeks you'll know." (Since then they've announced they'll be carrying Android.)
• LiMo has grown from 6 member companies a year ago to 54 members this year. Somebody commented that when a nonprofit shows you their member company logos on a slide, they aren't focused on their goal. (Hmm, should I take member company logo slides out of my GNOME presentations? :)
• I met with:
• Azingo (with Dave Neary) - some of their employees contribute to GNOME and they were interested in learning more about the GNOME Foundation
  
• Intel - had a good conversation with Imad.
• Ubuntu/Canonical (with Dave Neary) - Met with David Mandala, Oliver Grawert and Loïc Minier.
• Finish Centre for OSS solutions (COSS)
  
• Nokia - Met a lot of Nokia folks at OSiM and Maemo Summit. I continue to be impressed at how Nokia is handling open source and their relationship with the community.
• Idean
• Symbian
• ETH
  
• Black Duck - talked about doing a scan of GNOME on a pro-bono basis. The GNOME folks around thought it was a good idea. I think it might just divert resources that could better be spent elsewhere. (Analyzing BlackDuck results took the whole JBoss team several weeks before being acquired by RedHat.)
• T-systems
• Purple Labs
• Mozilla - I really liked the way the Mozilla guy at Maemo talked about the different members of the Mozilla community - I've made some very similar slides for GNOME.
• Sandro Gorganz from InitMarketing. Did an video interview where I talked about community marketing with GNOME. Showed off the annual report.

In summary, I think the mobile open source space is where the open source desktop/server space was a few years ago, but I don't think it will progress the same way as people know less about the software on their phone than their computers, there's not an established standard, and software is just a piece of the whole system.

Stormy