“We all have some learning to do”
June 16, 2008 4:39 pm freesoftware, maemo“We all have some learning to do” – that was the core message of Ari Jaaksi’s presentation, which has turned into a massive shitstorm over the past few days.
Yet again, I’m amazed at a knee-jerk populist reaction to a news story, and completely stunned at the spin which has been given to this, and swallowed hook, line & sinker by a large group of supposedly intelligent people. It’s been going on for years, so perhaps one more time shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.
For the benefit of those living in a burrow, here’s the quote that started it all:
“We want to educate open-source developers,” said Jaaksi, who is Nokia’s vice president of software and heads up the Finnish handset manufacturer’s open-source operations. “There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models.”
That’s the bit, since quoted without context, from an article which included the quote with little context in the first place. Look a little further, and you will see that this is the same message that Dr. Jaaksi delivered in San Francisco a few months ago: Nokia is learning how to interact with free software projects, but if free software developers want the software to be adopted further in mass-market products, then we need to understand the constraints that businesses work under, and address them.
In my mind, that’s a big “if”. Companies work under a bunch of constraints which don’t sit well with free software – DRM, the need for differentiation and a competitive edge. But also dealing with sub-contractors and suppliers who have their terms and conditions under which they’re prepared to work.
Some of the most outrageous things I’ve read these past few days:
Yeah, because Apple are a really free software friendly company.
“If Nokia can’t get the specs for chips from their suppliers, they should just build their own”
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?
Some people think that Nokia should use only free software in all their devices, regardless of the consequences of that (the consequences would be more difficult government validation of your phone with the GSM networks, no operator take-up of the phones, and thus no cheap phones subsidised when you take a subscription, and underpowered and outdated hardware). That may be fine for a user to have as an option if they don’t mind paying hundreds of dollars fora phone that doesn’t do as much as one that they can get for a tenth of the price or less – in fact, the Freerunner is aimed right at that market. It’s a niche market, not a mass market. One day, maybe…
In the meantime, the conclusion I draw from this is that the slashdot crowd aren’t as reasoned as I had hoped, many people who should know better are jumping to conclusions based on news headlines. What ever happened to critical thought?
Free software is great, a momentous gift to the world, but does not provide the answer to all questions. Sometimes, free software will not be the answer. Some sets of constraints will exclude us from the start. The battle is to change the constraints. But you cannot expect a business to lose money to satisfy philosophical arguments. If you’re ever talking to someone and trying to “sell” them free software, your starting point should be: “how will this (make|save) me money?”
Usually that answer will be easy to find – lower R&D costs, licencing fees, support costs you control better by deciding when to buy support, on what terms. But occasionally, there is no argument. There is no way to persuade Microsoft that releasing Office under the GPL would be a money-making move for them – it plainly wouldn’t be.
So if the answer to that question is “it won’t”, then wish them well, perhaps recommend something that will, and move on to another subject.
June 16th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I think moving on to another subject is all I’ll ever be able to do: I don’t recommend free software to people in order to save them money. Where I recommend free software qua free software it’s on ethical grounds. (Of course it often happens that I want to recommend a particular piece of free software anyway because it’s the best one available.)
June 16th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Perfectly said!
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.
June 16th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
“If Nokia can’t get the specs for chips from their suppliers, they should just build their own”
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.
June 16th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Probably better to get Jaaksi’s comment on the subject:
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…
June 17th, 2008 at 12:15 am
“I don’t recommend free software to people in order to save them money”
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.
June 17th, 2008 at 7:17 am
“Nokia is a long time contributor to some free software project, so the excuse that they need to learn is rather poor”
You always need to learn in a continous way.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Some people think that Nokia should use only free software in all their devices, regardless of the consequences of that (the consequences would be more difficult government validation of your phone with the GSM networks, no operator take-up of the phones, and thus no cheap phones subsidised when you take a subscription, and underpowered and outdated hardware
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.
June 18th, 2008 at 7:40 am
@deviceguy: This is the kind of naivety which I have a problem with. Nokia is one player in an industry that includes mobile network operators (the people who actually get your devices in the hands of the paying public, usually paying 80 to 90 percent of the cost of the phone for them), chipset vendors and, of course, other handset manufacturers.
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.
June 18th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Well said – free software is not the only solution out there. free choice is, and if the user freely chooses a proprietary tool, so be it.
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.
June 19th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Well said Dave. Nokia are one of the more open companies. We could all come up with a list of anti-open source companies that seemingly don’t get half as much bad press from the community.
Nokia are making strides. Are they ‘there’ yet? no, are they on the right track, yes!