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Transition to FOSSTransition to FOSSPosted Mar 21, 2012 11:24 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: Transition to FOSS by thisisme Parent article: The N9: what MeeGo could have been
Nokia did not exactly embrace Free Software. Sure, the company contributed to a bunch of projects and obviously funded the development of the projects acquired from Trolltech (although they managed to gut the revenue-generating opportunities of that division - something which was either incompetence or an internal power play to limit that division's influence), but you just have to look at the interactions between the company and the community to see that the decision-makers didn't really understand how to work in an open environment.
The article makes it pretty clear that not only does Nokia reserve the position of power for itself in any initiative - the attitude was always that customers and the community should count themselves lucky to have access to the toys - but that the organisation wastes a considerable amount of effort on undermining the usability of the eventual products: arbitrary limitations on functionality, contempt for purchasers of their devices, and so on. If people in the organisation were actually assigned to implement useful things instead of measures to keep the customer in check, maybe the resulting products would be competitive.
In fact, Nokia is a great example of not leveraging Free Software but instead attempting to constrain it. Sun also suffered from similar internal infighting, in its case leading to a generally incoherent Free Software strategy as various divisions presumably tried to turn the clock back to the proprietary glory days, in complete denial of the trajectory of the company and the industry.
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Transition to FOSS Posted Mar 21, 2012 11:41 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
A company like Nokia is very big and very diverse -- too big and too diverse that you can say "Nokia this, Nokia that". Even the Harmattan/MeeGo development teams had different attitudes around the board. I will repeat it here: the way Nokia's productivity team worked together with first the KOffice and then the Calligra community was exemplary.
Sure, there was a learning stage for everyone, but in the end, development was done upstream, bugs were tracked upstream, Nokia sponsored sprints, dinners, t-shirts, posters, organized classes for interns who would work on FreOffice and so on. And the result turned out to be really good for both parties.
Working with Nokia on KOffice/Calligra was without doubt the greatest project I have ever had. Others will have other tales, but I stand by mine.
Transition to FOSS Posted Mar 21, 2012 14:27 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I'm not denying your tales, although I would argue that if your objectives coincided sufficiently with Nokia's, your experience may have been better than others'. But it is appropriate to talk about Nokia as a single entity when assertions are made about the company embracing Free Software and when evaluating the company's products.
And the "big and diverse" attitude is used far too often when excusing corporate behaviour: it frequently allows one group of people to benefit from corporate wrongdoing while claiming that they don't really agree with it but they'd like everyone, presumably including those who are on the receiving end of that wrongdoing, directly or indirectly, to keep on indulging their community efforts.
Transition to FOSS Posted Mar 21, 2012 14:49 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
No, it isn't an excuse, but it does mean that blanket generalizations like yours are not justified. And since those generalizations tend to be exclusively negative, they obscure what went well -- and what went well is a much better lesson for the future.
Transition to FOSS Posted Mar 21, 2012 22:41 UTC (Wed) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
> If people in the organisation were actually assigned to implement useful things instead of measures to keep the customer in check
While it would be nice to have a mass-market smartphone that's useful for / wanted by normal end-users, but still open for tinkering (so that one could e.g. build further products on top it), I don't think Nokia ever aimed at that or saw it as a viable (profitable) market.
I don't think any other company provides such things either.
I guess that if MeeGo thing would have flown, there could have been *separate* developer phones, similar to what Google offers for Android:
(I'm a fellow N9-security hater though. :-))
> In fact, Nokia is a great example of not leveraging Free Software but instead attempting to constrain it.
Open source is about software, not about products. While Nokia treated the specific device distro versions (= collection of specific versions of SW) more like fixed product that gets mainly just fixes, a lot of the SW itself on them was developed openly, at upstream, and the development was more open with each new version, until MeeGo's demise...
It's true that the device end users didn't see much of the open development done by Nokia, but that's mostly because users aren't involved with the open source development, at the corresponding upstream projects[1].
This development happens before the product releases, not half a year after release when most users get the product. By that time the SW has stabilized and developers have mostly moved to new versions of the software, intended for next product(s) and not anymore fitting well into the old devices (lacking RAM, specific types of HW etc).
If there would have been further MeeGo devices, I don't think the lack of resources on previous models would have been such a problem anymore as N9 had 1GB of RAM... :-/
[1] A lot of that "community communication" was hiring of the community members to do the work, starting from around 2004 (output from that early time period was e.g. Xephyr, XResTop and Xresponse tools and many Matchbox window improvements, things that were used later for example in OLPC and OpenMoko).
Btw. Getting things to upstream is sometimes a long process, even when community members are hired to work on it. A good example from this list:
Is the UI "tap-and-hold" feature which upstreaming to Gtk was initiated in 2005:
That feature has comments up to almost today and and it's still not in, and I guess not going to be either. It was more relevant when screens were used with stylus and indication about press and hold action availability could actually be visible behind it. However, nowadays most devices are interacted with fat fingers, not with stylus...
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