On 8/6/07, Quim Gil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Just to clarify some roles here:
<-- snip -->
Take the best from each of us, that's my advice. We are just as good
> people and as well intentioned as you. And we work at Nokia, yes.
I probably haven't been lurking on this list long enough to have
"permission" to comment on this ;-) but even with the short time I've been
here I've seen some interesting posts.
I think part just has to do with the old "It's not free unless it's ALL
FREE" point of view. And part has to do with "Company X didn't address the
fact that Y didn't work for me by addressing me directly by name" or else
"Company X didn't address my problem in Internet time (i.e. time required
for one e-mail to traverse the world, i.e. < 1 sec.) Most don't realize
that's really only a fraction of a percent of the total people out there,
but they tend to be the most verbal.
I say "Company X" because it's not just Nokia. You see it on boards
everywhere about every tech gadget company, but I doubt that every tech
gadget company really sucks as bad as that myopic view says.
For a different point of view, I was instrumental over the past few months
of getting Canon Japan to agree to release the driver specifications for
their scanners to the SANE developers. It's taken 7 months of prodding, and
finally I threatened to switch all my scanners (I have about 14, all that
cost over $4500) to Bell + Howell simply because the SANE crew thinks
they'll have support for B+H soon.
Canon still wants an NDA out of the SANE developer, just to allow him to see
the control codes they send over USB to tell the scanner to feed a page.
Something that _could_ be reverse engineered given time.
So, seeing Nokia work so closely with open source development is great in my
mind.
Sure, we all wish that every aspect of the device was open source, but if so
you'd see a Chinese knock-off within a few weeks that would be half the
price and total crap that would break in a few weeks. That would end up
reflecting bad on the market in general at this point, and discourage Nokia
from releasing any more products. Some day I see things moving more that
direction, but it's got to come in stages, both to give big companies time
to embrace the idea, and to give consumers time to adapt to the idea as well
and recognize brand value.
If you had told me 5 years ago that any large company would release any
device like this and open-source any part of the system, it would have blown
me away.
And as far as hardware or compatibility or documentation goes, keep in mind,
Nokia is still a large company, and they tend to move slower than you do.
Most people have their narrow definition of job function, and they can't
expand beyond that without supervisory direction. It wouldn't be a company
if that wasn't so. As owner of more than one large "small business"
company, I can attest to that. I've gone from 6 employees to 45 in a matter
of 2 years, and it's important to get that layer of bureaucracy and control
or else the machine doesn't work right.
Just my $.02 that nobody asked for ;-)
-Tony
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