Getting constructive about Nokia and maemo
May 9, 2008 freesoftware, maemo 6 CommentsThere has been some criticism recently of Nokia and its handling of maemo - improving the state of affairs is one of the reasons why Quim contacted me and asked me if I’d be willing to work with the project to improve things.
The key to solving any problem is straightforward:
- Identify and characterise the problem
- Address one after the other the root causes of the problem
- Evaluate the situation after each change
This is similar to Federico Mena Quintero’s characterisation of profiling code. In fact, a surprising array of problems are suitable for attach with measure, change, re-measure, rinse, repeat.
The over-riding arc I’ve been hearing so far is “Nokia is hoarding control over the project, and aren’t doing enough to help the maemo community”. I think that’s a mite unfair, and often I get the feeling that people on the mailing list are confusing a reality where there are problems, but they are poorly characterised, and malicious intent on the part of Nokia.
Some examples:
- No, Nokia isn’t all-powerful, and can’t make Google fix Reader so it works better in microb
- Parts of the platform are restricted and can’t easily be replaced with later versions. Let’s get an explanation for that, and talk to the right person to get it fixed. Right now we don’t have the reasoning behind the decision, and that’s what’s missing in characterising the problem
- “Nokia is keeping control of the project” - what are Nokia keeping control of? Let’s identify the list of resources that would be useful to community members, and work, one by one, on seeing if Nokia is actually keeping control of them
- “The N8×0 tablets ship with proprietary components” - my priority is to ensure that you have documentation for everything possible on the tablet, but to me, there are two different things, maemo, the community project, and the N8×0 tablets, which are commercial ventures using maemo [*]
So I plan to apply this optimisation technique to various problems in maemo. For each proposal I make, I will be looking for feedback from Nokia and the maemo community to see if it is a step in the right direction.
For a start, I will be proposing policies for access to maemo resources, including maemo.org email addresses, the maemo trademark (which is of course linked to the email addresses), and any parts of the maemo platform which community members don’t feel are sufficiently open.
My goal is not to get everything open in doing this. It is to make clear the limits of the maemo project, and in this way ensure that expectations on both sides of the equation are coherent. I hope that Nokia will accept the proposals I make, but even if there are arguments against, I believe those arguments can be open, and clearly understood by all involved.
* I don’t believe that there has ever been ambiguity about this - all of the tablet which can be open is open, but some decisions to use closed components were made in the interests of product differentiation, cost and other reasons. The N8×0 is not meant to be a completely Free product (unlike the Neo1971 or OLPC, which do aim to be completely Free). What we should insist on is that someone buying an N8×0 has all of the tools they need to paperweight it with custom, non-Nokia, software, and access as much of the hardware as possible with free software.