With rise of open source software platforms everyone was convinced that the Open source model will never go down. But start of 2007 Apple announced about their new innovative mobile technology ‘iPhone’. Apple came with an appealing and winning model, most of them agreed.
What it also brought is closed and proprietary model that wouldn’t leave a scope for mobile open source platform. They said mobile and open source together would not work. That this market was too closed. That the carriers would not allow any openness.
It turned out to be false, because Google made Android open source and it became the fastest growing OS of all time, passing Apple at a speed nobody expected. Here comes the ray of hope for mobile to go open source again, but again not everyone was optimistic about Android that time.
Today we hear about Kindle Fire and I am confident that it is going to be the biggest competitor for Apple in mobile space. Well, I wouldn’t term ‘kill’ as it is not going to suddenly drop Apple market but it will live with it for a while. Good question to ask is – how did Amazon managed to challenge Apple in a jiffy?
Open Source.
Think about it. Amazon took an open source mobile operating system (Android), forked it, changed the UI a little and added a few apps. With that, it is going to build the most successful tablet of our times.
Amazon couldn’t stand a chance without open source. It gave them speed and time-to-market. It gave them a stable and high-quality platform. The ability to compete and innovate. And maybe the biggest advantage of all: an enormous development community. All things we always said open source would bring to the table, making a huge difference.
The Kindle Fire is yet-another demonstration of the power of open source. The innovation is not going to stop here. Expect even greater things in the future. With the market moving towards HTML5 and the open web, we'll be talking about the dominance of open source and openness again and again.
And yes, open source in mobile is doing way better than in the PC world. And yes, it is clearly showing to be the winning model.
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