Open source wireless tools emerge
The wireless development landscape differs from the wired world in a number of ways. For one thing, the dominance of handheld device manufacturers and proprietary OS makers has meant that open source projects for wireless connectivity have been slow to take off. But now this sector is showing some signs of life. In this article, Anne Zieger explains both the delays and the brightening future.
As 802.11 and other forms of wireless LAN technology become more popular -- and mobile applications become established in corporate life -- open source-based applications and tools are gradually emerging for use in the unwired world. Open source developers are creating apps that fill a long list of key WLAN roles, including connection monitors, WAP gateways, configuration analyzers, and security packages. There's also a slowly growing group of open source-based development tools under development, some from giants like Nokia and others from ad-hoc groups of volunteer programmers.
Though open source projects are beginning to bloom, wireless tools and apps are emerging more slowly than open source applications in other significant networking and telephony categories. At present, the mobile development world is largely controlled by major handset manufacturers, companies that generally make money by licensing copies of their own operating systems. And wireless LANs, for their part, have not become critical enough to attract the interest of the corporate sponsors who can give large open source projects a kick start.
In the traditional, wired communications world, open source projects are not uncommon; for instance, there are several projects aimed at developing open source alternatives to costly proprietary telecommunications infrastructure. The grandfather of all open source projects, GNU, includes a group that works on the GNU Bayonne telephony server. GNU Bayonne is a freely licensed product that allows small businesses, large enterprises, and commercial telephone carriers to create, deploy, and manage embedded, stand-alone, and Web-integrated telephony voice response solutions. (See the Resources section below for links to Bayonne and other companies and products mentioned in this article.)
