Marius,
re: your comment
Nokia currently stands in the middle between open and closed. I imagine
it is frustrating to both sides.
Is the reason that Nokia has some portions of the software as closed
source, because the suppliers of those components,or the underlying
hardware components, are requiring Nokia to keep such software closed
soruce?
Or, on the other hand, is Nokia trying to protect its own software IP by
having some of the software closed source?
I would be surprised if it were the latter because I would think that
Nokia's real source of value is in the Internet Tablet hardware and not
the software. On the other had if, by opening the source code for its
currently closed source software components, Nokia would make itself
more vulnerable to clone manufacturers (thus turning the Internet Tablet
into a commodity good) then I could see good reason, from Nokia's
perspective, for it to keep certain key components of software from
getting out into the opensource community.
As I understand it there are several ways to make profits from providing
solutions to customers that relate to opensource software in one way or
another:
1. Write and Sell Books about opensource products
2. Conduct and sell training and provide knowhow (consulting) on
opensource software
3. Provide Distribution management services (e.g. Novell, Redhat,
RPath, etc.)
4. Provide services that utilize opensource software (e.g.
Amazon.com and many Software as a Service www services)
5. Make and sell Hardware that runs opensource software (e.g.
network appliances of all sorts, servers, embedded systems, etc.)
6. Make and sell closed source software products that "gateway" to
opensource solutions via standard protocols.
7. Make and sell closed source software that runs on top of opensource.
Nokia, with respect to the Internet Tablet seems, to be doing #5 with a
little of #7 thrown in. I just don't understand how much net value they
are deriving from #7 given the "cost" of disturbing the maemo community
with their keeping a part of the software as closed source (assuming
that this decision is totally under their control, which it may not be).
Best Regards,
John Holmblad
Acadia Secure Networks
Marius Gedminas wrote:
On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 08:36:26AM +0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I'm not going to get into details about the packages mentioned, but as a
general answer...
So why on earth was it ever closed-source?
As mentioned in my previous email, project management issues had a big
weight on this kind of decisions. Objectively, when you are a huge
company and you need to deliver quickly software matching commercial
quality standards it is probably faster, cheaper and easier to deliver
it as closed source.
What? The only difference between open and closed is the licence and
the availability of the source code. The only delays I can imagine is
having to pass lawyer review to make sure no code you don't own and
cannot relicence made its way in there.
Quality has nothing to do with opening or closing the source code.
Well, maybe if the developers will know their code will be seen by other
they might care more about the quality of the source code and therefore
take a bit longer to release.
Given how the quality of closed-source software on the Nokia tablets
compares to a typical Linux desktop (hint: not in a good way), I'd have
to agree that you can deliver it faster and cheaper.
Open source is more efficient in the beta stage and in the mid term,
agreed.
The UI is different, it was decided to have it closed in order to
protect it from changes and deviations out of the control of the
project.
We aren't happy about that, but it's your code and you get to decide how
to licence it (and, unfortunately, you get to decide when to stop fixing
bugs that we can't fix ourselves without the source code).
Nowadays the history and context is a bit different, specially thanks to
the success of the maemo, IT OS and tablets projects. The wheels are
moving, as Kimmo says. Some things take some time, I insist. :)
At least there's hope for the future.
Nokia currently stands in the middle between open and closed. I imagine
it is frustrating to both sides.
Marius Gedminas
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