|
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS The Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting (MMB) team of the Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC) is showcasing Openmokast on Android at IBC 2009. Once again this year, the CRC will be exhibiting its DAB/DMB technologies as part of the IBC 2009 New Technology Campus, Stand 3.D02. The demonstrations will encompass many new developments. WHAT IS OPENMOKAST ? Openmokast stands for open mobile "broadkasting". There is a strong enthusiasm for physical layer mobile broadcasting technologies such as DAB/DMB, DVB-H and MediaFLO in both broadcast AND telecom industries today. Digital broadcasting is extremely efficient to distribute popular content, be it media or data. However, most commercial receivers with broadcast chip sets are vertically integrated and can thus not be programmed by independent developers. Lessons learned from the Internet ecosystem show that user innovation can be key in the creation of new and disruptive applications. The openmokast project was launched by the CRC to catalyse application innovation in mobile digital broadcasting through the development of an open software stack and open digital broadcasting enabled handsets. The openmoko project was selected as the basis for inital works.
HOW OPEN ? We believe in openness, sharing source code and open source business models. For several reasons however, we will initially release free compiled tools only. We hope and believe that that these tools will be helpful to many of you but we also understand that releasing source code will be essential to reaching true openness. And that is our goal. There are two main issues for not releasing our code now: project funding and intellectual property issues. The CRC is a fully publicly funded Canadian research lab. That's quite unique in a world where private investment plays an important and increasing role even in public reasearch. For us, it means greater flexibility and independence, but at the same time, less resources. As a result, our ability to focus on and expand specific projects is relatively limited. For these reasons, we're looking for interested parties to fund future developments and the release of our software code. Intellectual property is another important issue. How should, in the face of law, open source implementations of non-IP-free standards be dealt with? Many adopted "open standards" today include mandatory technologies for which royalties have to be paid. We still do not have a clear picture of this now and believe we're not ready for primetime. We preferred to release free tools NOW rather than to wait for all answers!
|
