Most of this posts text is in the slides where Dr. Ibrahim Haddad who is the Head of the Open Source Group within Samsung Research America explains Samsung’s focus on improving it’s footprint in open source software. By participating and contributing to key projects and a lot of new products. A contribution which might make them one of the leaders of the open source community and, according to the slides, they are nearing the top 3 of contributing companies.
Slides
The idea of Samsung dominating the Open Source Software development might seems to be a frightening one but think again. When several corporations were at each others bay, the OSS world wasn’t too bad. Google being the champion to fight Yahoo and AltaVista, Apple the pain in Microsofts’ ass and OpenOffice snapping at MS Offices’ heels.
True, it al was less complicated but then came the increasing importance of the Internet of Things, Internet as a mass tool (education, entertainment, TV, film and music distribution and such) but also as a sharing tool.
Sharing equals two things: More stuff and more fractions.
People feel unhappy or corporations decide to change their plans and somebody or someone start their own piece of software. Which leads to say, more or less interchangeable MS Office fighters that in total get less marketshare as the prosuming buyer, system planner or even the odd house father decides to go mainstream as Open Source gets too confusing. that creates fear, misunderstanding and, in marketing, declining market share and falling stars.
Having a massive corporation like Samsung working it’s way up into the rank of top-contributors is thus not a bad thing. It might turn sour if they suddenly decide to take parts of their OS contribution and make it proprietary. A scenario not too unlikely to happen: Just look at what happens to the Google-Android closing of sources.
Android at itself might be the best example of sinkhole source: We need HTML5 to create a platform that enables many coders to create a program that is not limited to just one configuration. On a platform that was set out to become the one and only standard open source platform for smartphones.
This all signifies the needs for Samsung as well as other major corporations to work together towards a digital world, an internet of cooperating things and happy people.
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