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Comments: 180 +- Linux: How Nokia Learned To Love Openness on Wednesday October 14, @10:59AM
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ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Once Sebastian Nyström laid out the logic of moving to open source, there was very little resistance within Nokia to doing so. I think that's significant; it means that, just as the GNU GPL has been tested in various courts and found valid, so has the logic behind open source — the openness that allows software to spread further, and improve quicker, for the mutual benefit of all. That idea is also increasingly accepted by hard-headed business people: it's become self-evident that it's a better way."
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Openess (Score:5, Insightful)
That idea is also increasingly accepted by hard-headed business people: it's become self-evident that it's a better way.
Of course this doesn't apply everywhere, but with things like Qt (cross-platform application and UI framework) it makes sense that everyone benefits from it. It's large things with thousands of users that do benefit from it, but if you're doing business with the the same product you cant really open it up and except still to get revenue - unless you go for the support route, but it also only works to certain types of products.
Re:Openess (Score:5, Interesting)
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A bad comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
Huge majority of Google's profits come from Internet advertising, which has very little or nothing to do with Open Source. In fact, Google's whole business model largely depends on it closely guarding the search engine's algorithms.
Google has a lot of Open Source projects certainly and I'm not denying that but any such are - in the end - pretty much a sidetrack. "If we have a thousand nice, small projects some of them will hopefully eventually be profitable enough to justify the rest and perhaps even add a
Re:A bad comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really. What do you think would happen if they published their algorithms? Hint: Nothing. It's not 1999 where Google's results are drastically better than Webcrawler's or whatever. Everyone uses Google. Everyone would keep using Google if someone else popped up and said they had Google's algorithms and a much worse database of sites.
Hell, for all we know Cuil or Bing has the greatest algorithm ever. No one will ever know because they don't go there.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason Google can't publish their algorithms is due to the huge SEO market, and people continuously reverse-engineering and exploiting it, leading to Google throwing in a new twist, lather, rinse, repeat. Google's results would quickly become irrelevant if their algorithms were known. Competing search engines barely even register as a concern in this case.
Re:Openess (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Open Source is self evidently a better way for certain areas of software development and certain companies. It doesn't necessarily follow that it is self evidently a better way in general. Open source libraries make sens in a lot of the same ways that open standards make sense. They're, in fact, the next obvious growth of open standards. If we can all agree on the inputs and the outputs of the blackbox, why don't we all just use the same transparent box instead?
Open source also makes a lot of sense when you look at "reinventing the wheel" type problems. I need an Operating System for my device. I don't really care about making money on the operating system, I want to make money on the device. Hey, look, here's this Open Source operating system that works on lots of devices, can be easily modified to work on my device, and saves me a ton of work. Open source makes sense. I can save a lot of work reinventing the wheel on a non-monetized product by using something someone else has already done and opened for me.
Open source makes less sense when your software is your product. Microsoft is understandably reluctant to release their source code. It is not self evident that Microsoft would benefit from opening up its products. In fact, most would agrue that the opposite is self evident.
Apple looked at the same problem that Nokia is looking at and decided that since they had an operating system in house already, it made more sense to just modify it then modifying someone else's open operating system. It's worked for them and it is not self evident that making a different choice would have worked out better.
It is self evident that using Open Source is superior in certain situations and under certain circumstances. It is self evident that NOT using Open Source is superior in certain situations and under circumstances. It is NOT self evident that using Open Source is inherently superior. At least not to me.
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Re:Openess (Score:5, Insightful)
Great points. Here's my two cents.
I bought a N800 because it was the right hardware for what I wanted to do. I needed something I could write on, something I could instant message on occasionally, and something that was light enough and small enough to have on me all the time. Some phones are good for messaging, some notebooks are good for writing, but the N800 brought it together for me.
Having Maemo, the open source OS, come specially developed for the N800 was a super plus because it offered me a lot more flexibility. True, a lot of what's out there is the standard issue FOSS apps -- but that's the point. I've run SSH sessions from my N800 to diagnose headless server issues, for crying out loud.
The rest of the time, I write on it, do some twitter, and keep it comfortably out of the way but close at hand. It's a brilliant device, Nokia made some great hardware choices, but they're not in the software biz. FOSS only helps make it better, and was a solid development choice.
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Re:Openess (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple looked at the same problem that Nokia is looking at and decided that since they had an operating system in house already, it made more sense to just modify it then modifying someone else's open operating system.
Except that Apple's operating system is based on modifying 'someone else's open operating system'.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes and no. If we want to call the kernel the operating system, then yes. Beyond that it gets a lot more complicated. They are making use of parts of an open kernel, and many open tools, but the vast majority of what users see as "OS X" or "iPhone" OS is Apple code. If the the Free BSD project disappeared tomorrow, Apple would shrug, hire a couple more kernel developers and move on. If the Linux Kernel project disappeared tomorrow most of these "Linux Device" vendors would be up a creek without a paddl
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But remember, Apple didn't just use their own stuff - they took an open source project (FreeBSD) and built their stuff on top of it; in the process they created two more projects - Dar
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're making the same point as the guy above you, but doing a much better job. I agree that Apple makes use of (and, quite fairly, contributes back too) Open Source software in many low level areas of OS X. However it is equally true that neither OS X itself, nor the iPhone OS can be called Open Source products. They are distinct from Darwin and OpenDarwin in ways that Linux device manufacturer's operating systems are not usually distinct from "Linux".
In a way Apple demonstrated my point very well. The
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Re:Openess (Score:5, Informative)
OS9 was good, but it wasn't going to take them to the future. Fortunately for Apple, Steve Jobs created NeXT and built NextStep after they booted him from Apple. When they brought him back (circa 1996), they did so through buying NeXT. Jobs then threw ought the next version of MacOS that was in the works (big failure project for Apple), and took NeXTStep and renamed it Mac OSX.
It had nothing to do with convenience for Apple at the time other than they needed a new OS. But it was Job's foresight that brought it to the table.
Apple also went out of their way to ensure their license (AAPL) was Open Source Compliant, and have done a fine job working with the Open Source Community, including maintaining CUPS and several other projects.
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Narrowsighted executives is nothing new. (Score:3, Interesting)
If those business people are happy to only compete on hardware, then yes.
If those business people also want to compete on software, OR, they don't read the license ("who reads the license?") and accidentally infringe, and therefore have to try to reach some agreement with a bunch of people who want nothing but to destroy them and see them humiliated, they might become less happy.
Nokia has decided to only compete on hardware, so no problem for them. Others who want to compete on software might disagree.
Re:Narrowsighted executives is nothing new. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you take other people's work and build on it and call the end result your own without
bothering to consider the terms involved then you quite rightly deserve to be humiliated.
It's no more than what you would get for acting like a toddler in any other context.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Nokia did not decide to only compete on hardware.
They decided that their improvements to the base software (open) plus their hardware, will sell more phones than competitors. And if other people help you maintain the base software, all the better.
They don't need to open whatever software modules they feel should remain closed for now. Also, if it's your platform, you know it better than outsiders (at least for a while) and can also take advantage of that.
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Exactly. They get more hobbyists to hack on their code, more community interest, applications, code contributions, testing, bug fixes, and visibility.
Most companies are afraid to open source their code because there's this fear that competitors will either use it and sell it in their product, or will "steal" ideas from it. The reality is that NIH (not invented here) syndrome almost al
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
accidentally infringe, and therefore have to try to reach some agreement with a bunch of people who want nothing but to destroy them and see them humiliated
Who said anything about the BSA?
!offtopic (Score:3, Informative)
I usually don't complain about moderation, but come on. The parent was claiming that those who used open source software and didn't follow the license would be confronted by people who want to destroy them. I was merely pointing out that using proprietary software and failing to follow the license would get you a visit from the BSA and be much more likely to destroy your business.
Sorry if that was too subtle for you, but in an article about the suitability of open source software for business use a compar
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"("who reads the license?")"
Anyone who wants to distribute software, particularly if they're doing it for money, that's who.
Otherwise they're no better than the guy selling ripped-off DVDs at the local market.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, Blizzard, Bungie... All those guys are the verge of bankruptcy. No one is willing to pay for software.
Solutions to many problems are available for free, but those solutions are not always very good. Even when they are good, they don't usually dominate the market. Linux, Apache, and Firefox are all great examples of successful Open Source products, and even they are still fighting tooth and nail for market share against very viable closed source competition. In most mark
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux, Apache, and Firefox are all great examples of successful Open Source products, and even they are still fighting tooth and nail for market share against very viable closed source competition
Of your examples Apache is the market leader on Web Server Software. If I remember the last time I looked it was over half.
In this case (Score:5, Insightful)
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Software companies on the other hand don't have such incentive to go Open Source, since that reduce the dollar value of their product. And therefore you see MS opposing Open Source.
The odd one is/was...Sun, a company that never decided whether i
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Now they get it. (Score:2)
Now with Android showing the way, they realize how closed development put them behind. I enjoyed my Nokia phones, but I got frustrated with the lack of development.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Too little? Too late?
You mean full linux platform where you can simply type "sudo gainroot" to get root access?
Platform to which it will be almost trivial to port a huge library of current linux apps?
Personally I really don't like Androids "open". The under the hood it's a closed platform that gives you a Java i
Re: (Score:2)
How is it late? Symbian was opensourced in 2008.
Re:Now they get it. (Score:4, Informative)
Maemo version 1 was released in 2005 on the Nokia 770. Before Android, before the iPhone. Just because Nokia's roadmap was a bit longer doesn't mean they weren't showing the way.
In six months we'll have all our lightweight desktop apps running on our phones and people will finally realize just how far ahead of everyone else Nokia really is.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In six months we'll have all our lightweight desktop apps running on our phones and people will finally realize just how far ahead of everyone else Nokia really is.
Some [youtube.com] heavyweight [youtube.com] as well.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for the info - this is the kind of thing I'd really be interested in seeing. A geek site giving us cutting edge news - instead it's just "Apple Apple Apple now you can get Iphone 3G, and look at a website!", telling us news about the Iphone, 3 years or so after almost every phone on the market has adopted it.
In six months we'll have all our lightweight desktop apps running on our phones and people will finally realize just how far ahead of everyone else Nokia really is.
I hope so. Although I fear it w
FTFY (Score:2, Interesting)
That idea is also increasingly accepted by hard-headed business people: it's become self-evident that it's^H^H^H^Hit can be a better way.
It can be a better way. It often *is* a better way. But it is not automatically a better way. A lot of it depends on project organization and leadership. Just like other non-OS projects.
Remember the great XFree86 wars and all the infighting? And the massive Xorg fork that was needed to get past all that? I'd say that XFree86 is an example of a OS project with se
Playing to Apple's weakness (Score:5, Insightful)
The next-gen Nokia phone [arstechnica.com] on the other hand (successor to the N900) will get all the hardware features of the iPhone, but with the openness of a linux software stack. Want to make an app that downloads podcasts? Fine! Want to use your phone as a modem? No problem! In fact, no corporation enforcing their moral or business rules on how you use your phone, or alienation of talented developers [macworld.com]!
Maemo and Qt being open source will ensure that the software features of the Maemo platform quickly eclipse those of the artificially limited iPhone platform. Maemo's based on Debian - so Nokia automatically gets just about every open-source software package in existence available on their platform.
I think this is the most serious threat that the turtleneck sweater brigade have yet seen.
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Sounds like the way my N97 (S60 R5 device) works ;).
That's not a source issue (Score:2)
Want to make an app that downloads podcasts? Fine! Want to use your phone as a modem? No problem!
You can do all that on an iPhone too - you just jailbreak it (and even some podcasting apps are in the app store).
The issue blocking that is not open source, it's carriers (and Apple to some extent). Android on T-Mobile has some issues with what they will allow as well (and rooting is not really much different from jailbreaking in terms of user ease).
As another person noted, Nokia's attempt to do this is too la
Re: (Score:2)
I think this is the most serious threat that the turtleneck sweater brigade have yet seen.
Except for the inconvenient fact that I can't find a piece of hardware (aka phone) with an open enough software stack on a carrier that provides good coverage where I live. I can find the former, but only by getting a phone from a carrier that doesn't have coverage at places like, oh, I don't know, MY HOUSE. The turtleneck sweater brigade have a little bit of breathing room due to the way the market works in the phone industry. Give me hardware/software uncoupled from carriers, and your statement holds m
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You might make the case that the N900 already has the better hardware when you compare it to the iphone. And for all people dismissing Nokia as just a hardware company, there's tons of non trivial Nokia IPR in the software stack as well (not all OSS admittedly), that provides lots of advantages in the performance or energy efficiency domain; excellent multimedia support (something a lot of smart phones are really bad at), hardware acceleration, etc. Essentially most vendors ship different combinations of ch
Picking up where Palm left off (Score:2)
Palm used to have a pretty neat developer community that would make their stuff do all kinds of wacky things. I've read a bit about the original creator of the Palm Pilot and how his company would get bought out and all the corporate folks would come in, and then he'd run off and start another company (Handspring) and introduce new ways to expand the device (remember the springboard modules? I actually had the GSM visorphone module one way back when). Anyway, I'm pretty distraught that Palm is kinda goin
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Apache, Firefox, 7-zip.
Oops, I shouldn't feed the troll.
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He has a point (and doesn't even mention Microsoft anywhere).
Open source development is often plagued with the lack of focus. And of course its like that, because *most* of the developers and programmers don't get paid for it. When you do and when software is produced commercially, there's lots of focus on it because it will also bring in the money. That's why most closed source *is* better than open source alternatives. Photoshop vs GIMP, Adobe Premiere vs. ??, Visual Studio vs. dev-c++.... And dont even g
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Re:"Openness" is a strategy for failure (Score:4, Funny)
M$ office vs OpenOffice.org
Parallels vs VirtualBox
(Yes I used the epithet "M$"), now watch my theory that the "M$" folks have automated bots or paid shills to mod down any post containing said derogatory term.
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Epithet (Score:2)
You asked for it. [penny-arcade.com]
Re:"Openness" is a strategy for failure (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not so sure that Visual Studio is better than the open source alternatives. Eclipse is quite good, and the latest versions of Visual Studio have hidden their keyboard shortcuts, making learning efficient use of the system more difficult.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Most closed source is better" is really relative.
Specifically if you consider money. If you don't have money to buy the "best" or if you don't need the features in the "best", than it is not so good, right?
I agree that in more specialized fields (such as image processing) the closed source versions are usually technically better. But, especially in more basic software (OS, deamons, compilers, ...), open source software tends to be better in the long term. UI apart, of course. The usability area is somethin
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
UI apart, of course. The usability area is something that definitively the community should focus more.
UI is one thing, but I think the main usability issue of the overwhelming majority of open source projects is the user documentation. Even though nowadays software engineers are often taught about documentation, and even though the community has broadened enough to have some skilled redactors that could contribute that way (if the devs did give a shit), many projects have no documentation worth mentioning.
And I think it's a more important concern than the UI, in most case. New users can be a bit confused by
Apple contributes a ton to open source. (Score:5, Informative)
Even they are not CONTRIBUTING to open source, more USING open source..
That is totally false.
They are a major contributor to webkit (the engine of Safari). They are a major contributor to GCC in the past, and now the LLVM project.
They also contribute back for all the other technologies you mentioned, and many more like launchd and now blocks/Grand Central.
Apple is one of the few companies to grasp the benefits of open source early, but the benefits are as much in contribution as they are in use - if you keep improvement's to yourself others cannot improve on them.
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Re: (Score:2)