LiPS 1.0 and Platform Fragmentation
I have taken a quick look at the new Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Release Specifications and Roadmap that are the result of 2.5 years work on evolving a mobile Linux standard.
The specification consists of some documentation and APIs in terms of a c interface (headers). Looking at the release plan it becomes apparent how much work there is yet to do. Aside from this, LiPS is just a specification. Members and third parties are required to implement the specification, provide tools and create phones. However, I would expect they are already doing this in parallel with the specification.
LiPS doesn’t cover the whole Mobile Linux OS. Instead it concentrates in the higher level parts (orange below) such that there can be a common programming API (and SDK) while allowing low level parts (black below) to be implemented differently by members, 3rd parties, phone OEMs or open source …
It’s possible to introduce new (phone specific) functionality through standard APIs that are accessible to all types of developer (subject to application security of course which is also included). At first I thought this was a bad thing and would result in fragmentation of the LiPS platform. However, thinking about it, it means that, provided extended standard APIs (via data rather than new functions) are used, the same code can be run on on phones with different capabilities. Through a LiPS mechanism called dynamic discovery, the code can be written to degrade gracefully or choose a particular set of functionality.
In contrast, the Symbian OS has evolved to push phone specific functionality (and unfortunately some non-specific) on top of the platform and this has resulted in UIQ, S60 and FOMA. These are not just UI variants but also include many extra internal and 3rd party APIs. Fragmentation is undesirable not only for developers but also for phone OEMs because they have to license extra software other than Symbian OS to create a new phone (or spend an inordinate amount of effort creating the missing components). Furthermore, they currently have to license this from their competitors (UIQ is owned by Sony Ericsson and S60 by Nokia). Incidentally, this puts Nokia and Sony Ericsson in a strong position with respect to using Symbian OS and Symbian itself has to work much harder to convince/help new licensees (as they did with NTT DoCoMo/FOMA).
If the LiPS extensibility scheme of pushing phone capability variations under rather than on top of the OS platform a) is workable and b) is adopted by phone OEMs, then it might actually prevent fragmentation.
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