Android, forking, and control: Communication

Android, forking, and control: Communication

Posted Jun 7, 2011 16:39 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: Android, forking, and control: Communication by martinfick
Parent article: Android, forking, and control

If you define "right after they started" as a period of over five or six years, yeah, then they gave up right after they started. They gave the GTK/Gnome world a long enough chance to produce something decent that a whole ecosystem of small Gnome/GTK-based companies sprouted. The same happened after they had to decide that Gnome/GTK was never going to work across Maemo and Symbian and they had to look for something better, which is Qt.

From my own experience with Nokia, with their involvement with first KOffice and then Calligra, a project that started in 2009, they really did everything right, and did do everything the way the community said it wanted -- if you budget for the fact that there was a learning curve for both the community and the company, which is only fair.

All the work on the KOffice/Calligra engine was done in the open, they took two dozen students as interns in an attempt to grow the community, joined sprints and conferences, used the project bugzilla and the project reviewboard. There's nothing for which they can be blamed and a lot for which they can be praised.

At the MWC in Barcelona, many people felt that Nokia had given working the open source way a fair try twice, and failed hard twice, while Apple with their "grab and don't give anything" mentality are a success and Google with their "grab and dump" mentality are a success, so open source is guaranteed failure.

In the end, though I am convinced that MeeGo didn't work for Nokia not because they worked with open source communities the wrong way or the right way: they failed because of internal problems and because of problems in their partnership with Intel. But nobody in the industry will see it that way.

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