As we prepare to publish a new, special CAOS report on open source software licensing, I thought it might be fitting to revisit one of our previous reports, CAOS Report 10 – Mobility Matters, given all that’s going on and all the open source going in smartphones, e-readers, netbooks, and other devices where open source is being used more and more.

Much of the battle at the top of the smartphone market is, as we expected, occurring with continued disruption from Apple’s iPhone, marked most recently by its latest 3.0 software update. As we discussed in CAOS 10, the response, defense and offense from smartphone rival RIM seems to be helping it to maintain its BlackBerry dominance. These two certainly bring a lot of attention, but two Linux-based alternatives — Android and Palm’s Pre — are stealing some of the limelight and perhaps, as we predicted, more of the market.

Open source is also expanding its mobile footprint with the open sourcing of Symbian via the Symbian Foundation. This instantly gives open source more share of the mobile platform market, as Symbian remains popular and is pushing aggressively for new developers.

The bottom line is some real opportunity for mobile Linux and open source software as smartphones continue to grow, device makers continue to innovate and mobile devices converge with desktop and notebook PCs, as well as cloud computing.

Mobile Linux and other open source software aimed directly at the mobile makret now have the right backing in handset makers, carriers and commercialization players. It also has the right timing along with the renewed smartphone category activity and innovation ushered by Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s response and the entry of new players, primarily Google in the case of Android and mobile Linux. This will all serve to help mobile open source software quietly, but substantially grow its share of ‘the rest of the market.’