Lacking support for open media formats [LWN.net]

Lacking support for open media formats

Posted Jan 9, 2007 14:47 UTC (Tue) by Hanno (guest, #41730)
In reply to: Lacking support for open media formats by tajyrink
Parent article: Nokia N800 announced

First: http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalog2006#head-1b...

Second:

I do not work for Nokia and I don't develop for this device, but I like it very much. I know little about Nokia and only heard about a few of their development activities. From that, I assume the following:

Nokia does not have a clear strategy in this. Nokia experiments, and they do it in a GOOD way.

They have started several projects, some of them open source, put some money into them and now they watch what happens. That's why they support Minimo, KHTML and yet still use Opera, all at the same time. They are betting on several horses.

Hildon and the 770 were an experiment to see if open source developers will pick it up and use it as intended - as a developer playground.

This was successful enough to come up with the N800, which I still do not consider an end-user device.

It is interesting that Nokia considers open source developers important enough to build this high-quality hardware (the 770 is a /very/ good device if you look at its hardware) and all the infrastructure the open source community needs.

You can consider them evil for expecting "us", the community, to work for free. You can consider them good for giving us one of the most interesting and most open Linux devices ever. You can consider Nokia evil because of their stance on software patents (and I do not like that at all). You can consider Nokia good because of their support for several major open source projects.

They experiment. Most likely there are even some groups fighting with each other inside the company. All in all, I like most of what Nokia does in this regard.

And yes, you can easily install OGG for this device.

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Most open Linux platform ever

Posted Jan 9, 2007 17:31 UTC (Tue) by mrfredsmoothie (guest, #3100) [Link] (1 responses)

You can consider them evil for expecting "us", the community, to work for free. You can consider them good for giving us one of the most interesting and most open Linux devices ever.

Please.

While I agree that the n770 is nice hardware, and the n800 looks slightly nicer, it's just ridiculous to assert something as assinine as that it is "one of the most open Linux devices ever." There are several software components (like _everything_ to do with battery management except the very low-level support in the kernel) and undocumented hardware components which remain proprietary, which Nokia seems very hesitant to document/release and without which the device functions extremely sub-optimally.

While I remain somewhat hopeful that Nokia will rectify this situation, it's been over a year already and if their apparent pace continues, it'll be quite some time and a whole bunch more hardware releases before any such claim of the "most open Linux device" has even a ring of truth.

Most open Linux platform ever

Posted Jan 9, 2007 17:43 UTC (Tue) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link]

You're right, I was exaggerating.

Nonetheless, Nokia has build a, well, very open device and is keen on building an actual developer community around it. (I used to own a Zaurus and was disappointed by the lack of actual developer support for it.)