OStatic

At yesterday's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, where Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone 3G and numerous other initiatives, it became very clear that the coming battle among smartphones will be largely decided on? the basis of who gets the best applications. Applications built with the upcoming iPhone 2.0 SDK looked very mature, and there were many demonstrations showing how easy they were to create. What does this mean for Google's Linux-based Android mobile platform and the wave of Linux-based phones expected later this year?

I've just been reading through a report from Olliance Group (a consulting firm for open source companies), and it contains some good material about companies and projects focused on open source. The report is a summary of the 2008 Open Source Think Tank from February, where 120 leading pundits came together. Quite a bit of the report contains familiar rah-rah material about Yahoo buying Zimbra and Sun buying MySQL, but the most interesting thoughts are about how open source software vendors can benefit from imitating some of the practices of mature software companies. Here's why some of this makes sense.