Nokia are making strides. Are they ‘there’ yet? no, are they on the right track, yes!

Now would somebody teach free choice to Nokia, please? the arrogant attitude of their software on my desktop has turned me off. Obviously the arrogance extends well beyond the desktop and brings about such deserved flames.

No one company has (to use your words) “enough muscle in the phone industry” to change the business models of dozens of the biggest companies in the world. Perhaps if Apple, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and DoCoMo joined forces and decided to do so, you’d see the rules of the game change. But that’s not likely to happen today or tomorrow.

Prove that network/regulatory validation is more difficult with free software. Prove that operators would not take up phone with free software. It has probably never been tried before.

Nokia has big enough muscle in the phone industry I don’t think they would have much more problems than they usually do.

You always need to learn in a continous way.

The article (and indeed Jaaksi’s original comment) talks about recommending free software to BUSINESSES.

Businesses will only adopt free software if it saves them money either now or in the future.

If free software has no possibility of doing this, it will not be adopted by businesses.

That’s it, that’s all they’re saying.

http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2008/06/some-learning-to-do.html

/me think that Nokia gots some communication and management problems:
- the video tag in html5: being unable to explain that xiph is a retrospec with an unique implementation (think ooxml), and that h264 is an iso spec (which took something like four year to be set) with multiple implementation, hence the problem is enticing mpeg-la to have a non-discriminatory license for software
-Nokia is a long time contributor to some free software project, so the excuse that they need to learn is rather poor
-in the above linked post, when failing to explain, resorting to authority which will be felt as arbitrary and being unable to conceive a strategy to which employee, partners and shareholders could adhere

In recent months it’s as if Nokia’s managers got technical or legal reports and were unable to decipher them. So they removed any sense in them and kept the parts that they understood.

Anyway, some other points:

>Uhmmm… do you really think that Nokia wants to go into competition with every micro-electronics company in the world? How much resources do people think Nokia really has?

They do conceive chips, and they do have a lot of resources (think more than 110 000 employees). Also, formula for chips can be bought, it’s just that the advantage of having the chip design for the compiler compared to the cheaper royalties cost of chips licenses instead of bought for failed phone design isn’t clear.

>Not everyone can code for a company which gives away all of its source code, in fact very very few do!

My guess is that it’s the opposite: subcontractor and services companies (deutshban, avis, and vodaphone need a lot of code to run their company, and those companies tend to ensure that they do have the 4 liberties on their code).

>Nokia makes an enormous number of contributions back most of the time without anyone actually paying them the credit they deserve, or without Nokia showing publicly that they deserve the credit. Subcontractors are the perfect example of this,

I thought that contributions to debian, gnome, glibc, and the linux kernel were better example…

This is not how it works. I work in a smaller company and we have the source code for almost every driver wich will be delivered to the customer as a blob (wifi, bluetooth, dsp…) It’s just yhat for various reasons Nokia can’t publish it.

Seriously, when you take a quote like that and mash it up enough times then the truth gets buried in hyperbole and nonsense.

I think this over blown reaction constitutes proof that there are a lot of “freetards” out there. People shouldn’t seek to have everything free as in freedom but understand a balance has to be reached. There are some things which are used to drive business, and our philosophy doesn’t extend into those arenas. The hardware situation for example between ATI and nVidia. They have massive competitive issues which they must address for their share holders first, as without a company nobody gets paid and these companies exist because of their technology.

Not everyone can code for a company which gives away all of its source code, in fact very very few do! The best thing about working for a company like Nokia is that they understand that open source is useful to them and therefore they contribute back, as Quim recently mentioned on p.g.o, and that I had discussed with him previously, Nokia makes an enormous number of contributions back most of the time without anyone actually paying them the credit they deserve, or without Nokia showing publicly that they deserve the credit. Subcontractors are the perfect example of this, Nokia have funded a lot of other companies which contribute but the Nokia name isn’t always attached.

I think the best thing to say about Nokia is that they don’t necessarily understand open source, but they understand that open source is of mutual benefit.

Its a shame the freetards out there don’t understand this, and regardless of the requirements placed on a company for things like DRM which companies must accept in the current market Nokia is doing a lot more good than joe schmoe sitting on his home computer making this or that commit to some random project.