Open-source economics, phone home

This year's O'Reilly annual Open Source Convention (OSCON) included a special one-day track called the Open Mobile Exchange -- a sort of state-of-the-universe overview of how Linux and other open-source software is being used in handheld devices, including mobile phones.

There was plenty of interesting fodder in the presentations, but the most striking tidbit came in a presentation on the decision by Symbian Software to open-source its operating system.

Symbian holds roughly a 60% share of the smartphone operating system market -- yes, more than Linux, Microsoft, Apple and everyone else put together. And the Symbian OS isn't losing ground to the competition.

So why is Symbian going open-source when it already owns the market?

According to John Forsyth, Symbian's VP for strategy, they had to. It was the only way for Symbian to gain ground in the market.

Sound weird? Well, Forsyth said that the number of new smartphone designs has flattened out in the past couple years, in part because of the cost of adding new features. In order to grow the market -- and convert cheap-phone buyers into smartphone buyers -- Symbian figures it has to get the cost down, as well as overcome some vendors' fear that an overwhelmingly dominant operating system maker might not be their best friend.

Symbian hopes that going open source, and turning the Symbian OS's code base over to an independent organization, will address both those issues.

Will it? It'll be interesting to see.

But one thing is already clear: The effects of open source on the economics of software just keep getting stranger.