Q&A: Morgan Gillis of the LiMo Foundation

FierceWireless editor Brian Dolan and I recently sat down with Morgan Gillis, executive director of the U.K.-based LiMo Foundation, to discuss how LiMo differs from the OHA, whether there's room for two open-source consortiums in the wireless industry and what challenges Google faces with the launch of the Android platform. Here's a little taste:

FierceDeveloper: While Google has promoted the openness of its platform for the end user, it still seems like that will eventually be determined by the way a mobile carrier adopts the Android platform. Is that true for LiMo's platform as well? 

Gillis: Ultimately, the openness of the handset is determined by the operator. Google has set up their stall where they are heavily promoting openness, and I'm sure they do really mean openness in terms of how the handset is offered to the user, but whether that's achieved or not is, I'm sure, dependent on the marketing policy of the carrier concerned... It's for that reason that I wasn't surprised at all to see that Google was assembling an industry consortium. I thought it was very understandable that last week the message that they really wanted to get across, first and foremost, was that they were engaging with the mobile industry rather than attempting to take over the industry or disintermediate the industry. 

For the full interview:
- head over to the FierceDeveloper website