Open season
Qualcomm is probably best known as the company that owns many of the patents for the technology behind 3G mobile connectivity. As such, a big part of its business model concerns protecting that IP - often in the courts - and making sure that anyone who uses it pays for the privilege.
So the news that Qualcomm's newly formed subsidiary - Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) - has joined the Symbian Foundation, a non-profit organization that maintains the code for an open source software platform based on Symbian OS.
To find out how Qualcomm can reconcile its IP licensing business model with diving into an open source community, HEXUS.channel spoke exclusively to the president of QuIC - Rob Chandhok - pictured below. We started by asking the reason for the apparent shift in strategy.
"We've always participated in standards and increasingly open source is defining those standards," said Chandhok. "A way to influence those standards is to participate in them. It's hard to imagine a phone without some open source in it."
We remarked that this seems a surprisingly open approach for a company with such an interest in protecting its own IP, and Chandhok neatly summed up the incentive for playing nice with the open source community. "Do the stuff that isn't going to differentiate you as a team," he said, and it makes sense. What's the point of trying to reinvent the wheel every time you want to create a new product?
