How Nokia Learned To Love Openness 180
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."
Re:"Openness" is a strategy for failure (Score:3, Informative)
Apache, Firefox, 7-zip.
Oops, I shouldn't feed the troll.
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.
Re:FTFY (Score:1, Informative)
Soooo... because of the infighting within XFree86, which eventually got resolved by the fork, closed source where no such forks can take place to get out of a stagnating or even decaying situation is... better? Or what's your "point"?
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.
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.
Re:"Openness" is a strategy for failure (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 an UI that isn't like what they are used to, it won't be a big concern (at least not for long) if the application, and its UI, is properly documented
!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 comparison to proprietary software is definitely on topic.
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.