Black Duck Blog

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
As I mentioned in my previous post, Google’s Android operating system has now surpassed the Apple OS as the second most popular smartphone OS behind #1 Research in Motion according to research firm NPD Group.

This is notable, but stepping away from the horse race mentality for a moment, you recognize that just about everyone who is producing smartphones is growing like gangbusters. The fact remains that the world can’t get enough of smartphones in general. IDC reported this week that global sales of smartphones increased by 57 percent in the first quarter of 2010, with 54.7 million units shipped. That’s a lot of smartphones.

So what does any of this have to do with usability, anyway?

One of the last hurdles to broad desktop and consumer adoption of open source has been ease of use through well-designed user experience (UE)I. But judging from the growing adoption of Android, mobile OS development is changing this and could fundamentally change the way that consumers think about open source applications in general.

While the iPhone OS includes some open source code, it is propriety. And Apple has touted that complete control of the phone enables them to deliver great UE. In contrast, the Android platform is built entirely on open source and developed through the collaborative process that is the OSS hallmark. There is a growing recognition that the Android UE is very good and competes well vs the iPhone. See Jason Kincaid’s blog post on TechCrunch.

The iPhone has taught us that user experience (UE) makes or breaks a smartphone, and that good UE has the capacity to change the way we build devices into the framework of our daily lives. It’’s critical to smartphone design for virtually all consumers: hackers, business executives and everyone in between. Consequently, as both Android adoption and development overtake the iPhone, more energy and innovation will go toward OSS-related usability than ever before.

For Apple, UE has always been the key differentiator. For OS, great UE has been lacking. This is changing in the mobile world, and portends greater shifts in open source adoption and acceptance among regular consumers.

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
Google’s Android OS is now the second most popular smartphone platform in the US, pushing Apple’s iPhone to third place. BlackBerry remains in first place, according to a report by research firm NPD Group and reported this week by Marguerite Reardon for CNET.

According to NPD, devices running Android accounted for 28 percent of the units sold to U.S. consumers in the first quarter of 2010. BlackBerry devices made by Research In Motion, which use RIM’s homegrown operating system, took the top spot with 36 percent of the U.S. market. Apple’s iPhone, which had been in the No. 2 spot previously, fell to third place with 21 percent of the market.

This shouldn’t come as a much of a surprise to regular readers of the Black Duck Blog, of course!

Back in March, we reported that new open source projects for Android were three times those of the iPhone in 2009. The Black Duck Software analysis of open source mobile projects showed that Android experienced 168 percent growth year-over-year, as compared to 43 percent growth for iPhone-related OSS projects (which tied for second place with Windows Mobile, which also saw 43 percent growth).

In 2009 new projects for Android represented 25% of all new OSS mobile projects and exceeded the number of new projects for the next six platforms combined. The “Big Mo,” so to speak, was definitely on Android’s side.

At the time, I noted that at a macro level this represents something of a showdown between the OSS community (Android) and proprietary development (iPhone).

But as I also pointed out, its important to mention that Apple’s iPhone benefits significantly from OSS integrated with proprietary code (like many software platforms today, we’d characterize it as a “multi-source” platform). Apple ported much of its core FreeBSD-based operating system to the iPhone and uses the Safari browser which is built on OSS to name just a few. Still, the secret sauce of the iPhone is, well, secret.

Scoring a big win for the closed model, the iPhone OS was conceived and delivered through Apple’s secret process, and it took the world – and consumers – by storm. With an interface that combined simplicity and power like nothing before, the iPhone OS revolutionized the way we use and think about mobile devices.

The iPhone OS is also used in the recently launched Apple iPad, which by some estimated could generate $1 billion in revenue for Apple in the next quarter alone. Sometimes money actually does talk, and this case, it is saying, “We love you Apple and we love you too, iPhone OS.”

Regardless of past performance, the increase in the rate of adoption of the Android OS is likely the topic of many hush-hush, closed-door proprietary meetings at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino. User experience has always been Apple’s differentiator. In contrast, user experience has not been a strength for open source even as projects like Gnome have made significant progress for the desktop. Is that all about to change? More on that soon.

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
In Matt Asay’s April 19th blog posting he asks “Where are all the open-source mobile developers?” reflecting a view that there are few open source applications and that most open source developers are working on desktop and server environments. Working with the Black Duck Knowledgebase, which is a compilation of all open source projects, and our customers over the last few years, I’ve developed a view of the open source market that is different from what’s typically reported in the popular media and also simultaneously supports and contradicts Matt’s perspective on mobile. I’ll make an analogy that popular projects are like the popular species at the National Zoo, they get all the attention but they’re a small part of the overall story.

The most well known open source project is Linux. In fact for many people ‘Linux’ is synonymous with ‘the open source market.’ The Linux development process is chronicled and tracked more closely than the birth and development of a baby panda at the National Zoo (pandacam is here ). For example Linux version releases, how many lines of code were added, how many developers work for commercial companies (75%), etc., are tracked and reported regularly. And with good reason, as Linux arguably is the most widely used and significant open source project. Popular open source projects like Tomcat and JBOSS, the two leading app servers, rightfully receive a lot of coverage as well, as do the databases MySQL, PostgreSQL, scripting languages like PHP and other possible substitute pieces of LAMP-like stacks. Add up all these projects and we’re talking about maybe a few dozen projects. But how many developers have the opportunity to choose the base operating system, or what database will be used? It’s more typical that a developer is looking for a component that they can use as part of their application assembly task, almost literally the ‘nuts and bolts’ of their project.

The Washington National Zoo has 2,000 animals from over 400 different species; that’s a lot more than just pandas. Similarly, in the open source world the few dozen or so very popular projects get all the attention but represent a small fraction of what’s available to developers – the “abundance” of open source as Matt Asay has described it. In the Black Duck KnowledgeBase we track popular projects but also the ‘long tail’ (longer than the tail on a Cotton-Topped Tamarin!) representing over 250,000 downloadable open source projects from 5,000 sites. Many of these are components that developers use for different elements of applications and services and don’t have the glamour-factor associated with Linux or MySQL. They include libraries, parsers, bluetooth wireless elements, protocol stacks and much much more.

Matt Asay asks “where are all the open source mobile developers” and why so few mobile open source applications. My view is there are many open source projects in mobile, but just like in the general computing and Internet world, most of them are not the popular projects like Android but the many piece parts that are used to assemble mobile app’s. We did some research on open source projects in mobile recently and found lots of development going on. There were some 900 new open source projects for the mobile space created in 2009 bringing the total to over 3,200 projects, a 39 percent increase over 2008. The iPhone and its app’s are visible but the open source projects they are built on are not (e.g., the Safari browser is built on webkit, the o/s is built on FreeBSD, etc.).

So Matt is correct that there are not many open source mobile app’s but there are thousands of open source mobile projects. And while I expect the number of open source mobile app’s to grow significantly, the open source ‘piece parts’ may be most important to innovation and growth.

Peter Vescuso
Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development
pvescuso@blackducksoftware.com
Black Duck just released new data on the impressive growth of open source projects for mobile platforms. The data provides quantification for the highly reported battle between Apple and Google (see this past Sunday’s New York Times).  Our analysis shows that new open source projects for Android were 3X those of the iPhone in 2009. While to some extent this is a brawl between two Silicon Valley heavyweights, at a more macro level it’s a showdown between the OSS community and proprietary development (with Apple as the poster child).

Apple with the iPhone created a new paradigm for the mobile experience. It combined top notch UI design, touch screen technology, with the app store that leveraged their iPod experience, and combined it all with mobile 3G network capability and GPS. The result was a hit and a meteoric rise in adoption and market share. The iPhone has about 25% share of the 43 million smartphone subscribers in the US, even though it is still offered by only one operator, AT&T. Imagine what iPhone share would be if it were offered by Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint? (BTW, AT&T recently reported record 2009 results in their wireless business, much of which I’d attribute to the iPhone).

The Android platform is a breakthrough in mobile software platforms, built entirely on open source. It has received a tremendous amount of attention and attracted thousands of developers. It’s important to note that Apple’s iPhone benefitted significantly from OSS integrated with proprietary code (like many software platforms today, we’d characterize it as a “multi-source” platform). Apple ported much of its core FreeBSD-based operating system to the iPhone, uses the Safari browser which is built on OSS, plus incorporated many other OSS elements and libraries (e.g., zlib, libgcc, ncurses, etc.).

In this showdown, the question is: does the introduction of an open-source mobile platform change the mobile app landscape, and are OSS apps a leading indicator of market change? Time will tell but the near term results are promising for Android. It’s gaining market share and winning support from the OSS community (as well as commercial developers). While Android admittedly is still young, the combination of an open platform, attractive UI, and great hardware with support from multiple handset manufacturers and from multiple operators seems to bode well for its future. What do you think?