My conclusion in a nutshell: these things would not happen this way if the community at large would know about Nokia’s open source contributions.
— Quim about Nokia’s PR desaster
I’ve long since thought that this line of thinking, that apparently quite a few companies believe in, is wrong: “Hey, we have contributed lots of money to your cause, now we must have something to say!” I’m sorry, but that is wrong. There’s a reason why it’s called the open source community, not the open source stock exchange.
How much you have to say depends entirely on how much respect you have with your peers. And of course, you can be respected differently depending on topic. There’s a reason why some people are role models when it comes to technical opinion, but not when it comes to licensing questions. And for others this is different again.
So to wrap it up: If Nokia comes along and tells that they have contributed lots of code, I might expect Nokia to have technical know-how. If it also tells me I need to accept closed source, I will not trust it with leadership. So Nokia, I’ll be very happy to work with your engineers.
7 comments ↓
otte++
Very well said Benjamin. I fully agree with this line of thinking.
Yes, we’re prodding people (both internally and externally) to sort out the messaging: if Quim was talking to everyone, we’d be set, but unfortunately at the moment, we’re stuck in the no-man’s-land of someone who is neither a good communicator nor a good engineer doing all our communication with engineers. :(
It looks like the way forward is that we’ll very carefully split our communications between audiences soon, so the suits can talk to suits, the engineers (including me) can continue to talk to engineers, and never (rarely) the twain shall meet.
@daniels: And you expect the engineers not to listen to what is say to suits? I mean, some of us do read business news too..
@Olivier: I don’t expect them to be saying stupid and/or incorrect things, of course. :) Hopefully no-one will be doing any of that. What we will hopefully see though is both sides getting a very clear message in their usual terms.
Developers will discuss technical stuff with other developers, and any noise that doesn’t affect the community will stick to the trade press. Of course, there’s still non-technical stuff we need to explain to the community, but we do have people who are more than capable of doing that (of which some have been for quite some time).
Well, I was mainly thinking about a huge percentage of Slashdot noisy commenters really not knowing that Nokia has been actively developing and contributing to many free softwware projects through a bunch of engineers really knowing what they do. Nothing else.
A lot of the flaming last weekend was propagated by people that had enough reading the header of a header of a quote to start ranting. This didn’t happen though in i.e. Planet GNOME and I believe that the reason is that the % of people knowing about Nokia activities in the community is higher.
Or perhaps it was just a coincidence.
In any case it was not monetary thinking, even if I reckon that for a title of a blog post the sentence works well. ;) I have this journalist background and I have this tendency to think that everything going wrong has a problem in communication. I might still have a chance to be rescued thanks to daniels and other clever minds around.
Cheers
Yeah, Quim, I assumed that you are aware of these issues, and that you likely targeted a specific non-pgo audience in that post. But it was the post that made me realize this is a common thing. Plus, various Nokia employees have used this line of thought before, so I think it wasn’t a bad thing to use a Nokia post as an example. :)