The Open Mobile Consortium is focused on developing open source mobile solutions for social impact and change. There have been many myths surrounding open source software and little conversation in this field why open source software is important and successful, especially in the context of developing countries and in the field of mobiles for development.
Let's debunk some of these myths and clarify why the Open Mobile Consortium is focused on open source mobile solutions that talk to and build on one another.
What is Open Source?
To clarify the term: Open source software technically simply describes computer software for which the source code and certain other rights, normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that meets the Open Source Definition, or that is in the public domain. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. Open source software is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner.
Open Source in the Mobile 4 Development Field
As the world has become mobile with more than 4 billion phones in circulation in every country in the world, many NGOs are exploring how mobile phones can advance health and social development, particularly in developing countries. As a result, there has been a proliferation of mobile software applications for data collection, patient management, data mapping, emergency communications, human rights monitoring, and many other areas in which civil society organizations work.
Interoperability
As we are seeing this proliferation of applications, there are many instances where relevant tools for an organization do not talk to one another -- a mobile application may not talk to another back-end tool needed to parse the data efficiently, or two applications that have complementary functionality are not able to interoperate. With closed solutions, those where the source code is held by one company or organizations, there is often not an easy way to combine complimentary applications to derive maximum benefit for an organization. Here again, users can tailor the products as necessary to meet their needs in ways not possible without source code. Users can tailor the product themselves, or hire whoever they think can solve the problem (including the original developer).
Leveraging Donor Contributions
With this proliferation of tools, inevitably there are redundancies and inefficiencies. This should particularly concern donors who fund the development of mobile applications. There are now at least ten mobile data collection tools built by NGOs available, all with similar functionality. While we think that variety of offerings is great for organizations, there is a point where this is simply not good use of donor and development resources.
Inversely, open source tools allows organizations to leverage developer resources outside of the organization, stretching donor contributions farther. For example, in the mobile space, there is often a need for comprehensive handset libraries that allow tools to run on the hundreds of different handsets and on different operating systems. Open source applications can, for example, leverage shared phone libraries that no one organization has to painstakingly and expensively build.
The availability of open source software readily available without any licensing costs is, of course, also critical for the many more organizations that do not have resources to build or modify tools but simply want to be able to use ready-to-implement applications. The Open Mobile Consortium features these tools and points organizations to where they can download them.
Should any organization at a future point need to adapt any of the mobile tools to specific circumstances with custom modifications, this process is much easier with an application for which the source code is available.
Local Innovation Communities
Open source software encourages, not quashes, innovation. It has been said that “the open development model opens up the ability to contribute to innovation on a global basis. It recognizes that the distribution of natural intelligence does not correspond to the monopolization of innovation by the richest firms or richest countries [or organizations]. In fact, there are a number of organizations that are building active local developer communities with talented developers in Tanzania, Rwanda, and Kenya, to name just a few.
In fact, we heard this: Proprietary models are anathema to capacity building in developing environment. Local pro-business ecosystems will emerge with open source solutions--something that many development organizations should be delighted about. In fact, the Rwandan government will in fact soon incentivise people to do build on OpenMRS, a medical records management system that OpenRosa builds on, in turn..
User Support
- OSS/FS is not supported. Nope. Plenty of user communities, needs
some examples from collaborations in the case of the OMC.
Standards
- OSS/FS is not standards-compliant.
- Having the ability to view and change source code is not really
valuable/important for many people.
