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The mobile messaging landscape of today is dominated by a number of closed and proprietary solutions, such as the well-known BlackBerry system.
The components of these competing systems do not interoperate, and they cannot build on each others assets. The result of this is the fragmentation of the mobile messaging market into a number of isolated islands of consumers, each limited to a particular closed solution.
All these closed solutions are heavily defended by patents, and competition among them often takes the form of aggressive patent litigation. We have already seen a number of highly public patent fights between RIM and various other litigants.
These costly and embarrassing patent fiascos are an inevitable consequence of the existing closed and patented competitive environment. In the long run the existing situation is is untenable. Sooner or later the industry must abandon the closed competitive model, and instead adopt a single set of open protocols that guarantee industry-wide interoperability.
In a previous article we have described how equivalent mobile
messaging functionality to the existing closed systems can be provided
in the form of a completely open solution, based on existing protocols
and technologies. For complete details see Operation WhiteBerry:
Creation of a truly open mobile messaging solution, available at:
http://www.leapforum.org/operationWhiteberry/index.html
The key component of WhiteBerry is a set of open mobile messaging protocols. These exist already, are complete, fully satisfy all necessary technical requirements, are truly open and patent-free, and have been published as RFCs.
An open paradigm is the right model for the mobile messaging industry. An open industry model provides the greatest benefit to the end user and the industry at large, by allowing free market entry and competition at any point within the mobile messaging solution domain. This in turn results in greatly increased business opportunities, more and better solutions for the end user, and unrestricted industry growth.
The WhiteBerry solution requires implementation of the protocols in both end-user devices (the front end) and message centers (the back end). In particular an Internet service must be created to support WhiteBerry users.
The WhiteBerry service can be implemented using end-to-end free software. Thus the end-user device can run entirely on free software, and the message center service can be implemented entirely in free software--in other words it can be a Libre Service. We refer to such an implementation of WhiteBerry as Libre Mobile Messaging.
The purpose of this project is to create the WhiteBerry back-end service.
The evolution of PDA software is already moving towards a free software implementation, and we expect that eventually end-user devices will run on pure free software. The scope of this project is limited to the back end only.
As described below, the WhiteBerry solution has already been implemented in the form of message center software. The goal of this project is to turn the WhiteBerry message center software into a complete Libre Service.
This is a medium-priority project.
A schedule for this project has not yet been established.
We are currently seeking sponsorship for this project.
A project manager has not yet been assigned.
Open-source software implementations of the WhiteBerry solution are already available for all major device and message center platforms.
Reference Procotol Engines have been implemented in the form of portable code, which has been ported to a wide variety of platforms and end user devices. On the device side, software has been implemented for pagers and cell phones; for palmtop devices (Windows CE, Pocket PC, Palm OS, EPOC); for Windows 2000, Windows 98/95, and Windows NT; and for Pine (UNIX, Windows, DOS). On the message center side, software is available for Windows NT, Solaris, and Linux.
All this software is freely and publicly available at the MailMeAnywhere open-source software distribution center. The software is available as free software, subject to the General Public License (GPL). For complete details visit MailMeAnywhere at http://www.MailMeAnywhere.org.