Ben,
<< It seemed curious that NOK would tie itself into exclusive development agreements with DoCoMo at the cost of pissing off VOD... >>
It might be curious if NOK had tied itself into exclusive development agreements with DoCoMo.
It becomes less curious if you understand the purpose of the development agreement, and the fact that the development efforts are NOT exclusive and they are intended for use by the source sharing community that Vodafone helped form. It is all part of the Open Mobile Architecture Initiative (OMAI) that Vodafone is very much a part of.
The DoCoMo agreement was announced the day after the OMAI was announced and is part and parcel of that initiative as is the joint development effort of Sony and Nokia.
Original members OMAI were:
AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless, MM02, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica Moviles, Vodafone, Fujitsu, Matsushita, Mitsubishi Electric, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, and Symbian.
New members of OMAI include:
BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems, Borland, HP, IBM, Oracle, STMicroelectronics, and Texas Instruments.
On behalf of the OMAI community Nokia & DoCoMo will collaborate to create specifications for an open architecture in the following areas:
(1) WAP 2.0 browsing extensions
(2) MMS messaging
(3) Java application execution environment
(4) Security & Certification
OMAI plans to adopt the standardized specifications agreed upon by NTT DoCoMo and Nokia.
Nokia will undoubtedly code to the specifications for their own use and (attempt to) license the source to others, but other members of OMAI and their partners can do the same from the specifications developed by DoCoMo and Nokia. Alternatively others may license the source from Nokia, modify the source and relicense the modified package.
From a Qualcomm perspective the recent addition of IBM to OMAI is healthy since BREW will support an IBM Java VM (while Nokia and others are currently using a Borland Java VM and tools).
Moreover Softwired Switzerland is working with the Vodafone R&D Group, to create a Java application prototypeing environment and construct a mobile applications platform based on Softwired's iBus//Mobile and iBus//MessageServer products. Softwired has just added support of IBM's J9 Virtual Machine to its JMS iBus//Mobile middleware platform.
- Eric - |
