Is it free software? [LWN.net]

Is it free software?

Posted Nov 28, 2012 13:24 UTC (Wed) by gerv (subscriber, #3376)
In reply to: Is it free software? by lbt
Parent article: Jolla offer a first look at their Sailfish smartphone OS (The Verge)

Should a company open every line of code they write before anything ships?

That's our plan for Firefox OS. At least, those parts we have control over the source of. AIUI no-one has yet managed to ship a phone (any phone, I _think_, and certainly not one in commercial quantities via standard channels) which is 100% open source software, and sadly Firefox OS, v1 at least, won't be it. But everything from Gecko upwards is open, and most of the lower parts too.

What happens to the business model and potentially the investor story in that case?

Much has been written on how to make money from free software. Our business development people certainly have ideas of how it can be done in our case. We have the advantage of a strong existing brand, of course.

Mobile companies, I suggest, are not interested in "another Android". Being "as open as Android" just leads to the response "well, then I can just use Android". You need to give carriers and OEMs more control - and the openness of your project is their guarantee of that control. Because you can't lock them out of the source tree if some agreement isn't renewed, so that e.g. in the Android case, they get the code six months later than everyone else. The elimination of that possibility should be attractive to them.

Gerv

(Log in to post comments)

Is it free software?

Posted Dec 1, 2012 13:34 UTC (Sat) by edgar2 (guest, #88114) [Link]

You need to give carriers and OEMs more control - and the openness of your project is their guarantee of that control.

this here is interesting. from the perspective of someone interested of buying and using the device, another MyNokia* or CarrierIQ are just not desirable. it's one thing to allow carriers (or anyone else for that matter) to develop business models on top of an open platform, but it's a different matter if whatever business the carriers have in mind is something that is deceitful or cannot be avoided/uninstalled.

_________________________________________________________
* https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10366

Is it free software?

Posted Dec 3, 2012 9:51 UTC (Mon) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

You just develop the OS. Nothing wrong with that but I fully expect most phone distributions of FirefoxOS to be rather locked down by carriers and phone manufacturers. If Jolla releases the code shortly after their device comes on the market, I don't really consider it much more closed than such a locked FirefoxOS phone.

More importantly, Jolla might very well have good incentives to open up development in time. Once they release and things work out from a business perspective I think it's not unlikely that, piece by piece, development opens up.

Last but not least, I'm not a big fan of the HTML5 and web fad. Unless the web starts moving to the Affero GPL I pick a GPL native app any time over a web app from a freedom perspective. That is not meant to put down the awesome work Mozilla does for the web, don't get me wrong - I just happen to think the whole direction is dangerous.