OSiM USA 2008 - Day 1

Today was the first day of the two day conference, at San Francisco. It was packed with many sessions, few demos, networking breaks and food.

Most of the presenters were eloquent and knowledgeable in their fields, so all of the sessions were pretty interesting. At high level, today's sessions covered 4 areas: General discussion on role of Open Source in Mobile, security aspects, communities and licensing.

As an open source developer, I cannot say I learnt anything new about the technology. But I did gather bunch of information about several forces that are driving the mobile industry and how Open Source is going to play key role in it. Here are some highlights.

Most interesting thing of the day was the discussion with the Funambol representative (Hal Steger). Too bad I hadn't heard about them before. They provide push email and PIM syncing services to mobile users. They have developed the whole project under open source. It was pretty interesting to listen to their revenue model, which is essentially advertisements-based. Hal was kind enough to answer my questions on various details.

I also enjoyed talking to the Access developers, who demoed the SDK for Access Development community. It made me aware that Mameo, OpenMoko and Qtopia are not the only ones in that category.

The sessions were driven by Andrew Aitken (from Olliance Consulting Group) whose various comments throughout the day were very insightful on respective subjects.

Among morning sessions, Michael McLaughlin's (Azingo) presentation was very entertaining. Their push for LiMo based application development looks like a strategy. It will be interesting to see how LiMo platform evolves with competition from Android and others. I hope to get more understanding on LiMo tommorrow.

The security session by Bob Guimarin (Motorola's senior director of Security technology) was also neat. It showed how the corporations value open source communities to harden the products by means of code reviews and testing.

There were 3-4 very interesting sessions that discussed Open Source "communities" and various licenses under OS. After exploring so many open source projects in past few years I hardly found anything new in those sessions. However from the point of view of corporations investing into open source projects, it must have been educational. The concepts like typical 3-tier communities (core developers, contributors and users); mailing list conventions are taken for granted by regular source-forgers. Seeing them as part of a formal presentation just underlined what I already knew. However all the speakers were pretty witty and made the sessions enjoyable.

I am very hopeful for tommorrow. The sessions that were my main motivations to attend this conference will be tommorrow - Sean Moss-Pultz of OpenMoko and Ari Jaaski from Nokia. I am also curious to listen to Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco.

Stay tuned...