In February, 24 of the world’s largest telecoms announced the formation of an alliance – the Wholesale Applications Community – to provided a unified and open platform for the rapidly growing – both in magnitude and fragmentation – mobile application market. The stated aim to enable developers to “deploy a single application across multiple devices (through the use of standard technologies) and across multiple operators”, which will lower costs and improve both the quality and quantity of mobile applications available to consumers.

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SYNOPSIS

There is a curious paradox which we are seeing increasingly. We see closed systems built on open standards and open source. I illustrate the phenomenon giving three instances below (Apple and Facetime, Open source and the Cloud and SPDY – the proposed new protocol from Google to replace HTTP). I seek comments on these.
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During the eighteenth century, coal miners used a canary in a coal mine as an indicator of noxious gases while exploring new caves. Along the same lines, whenever we see the development of competing standards, we are seeing the emergence of a new market place.

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Standards are supposed to be ‘boring’ and formalized but once in a while, we get some very colourful language. The Adobe – Apple debate has been getting a lot of coverage but last week, we reached new heights when Opera joined in the debate and said:

“At Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology.”
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I have long studied the philosophy of Open systems from an NPOV (Neutral point of view) perspective, and it often comes up with a series of contradictions.

For example: Apple had long prided itself on being ‘closed’. Not many people questioned this ecosystem
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