[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] RE: Nokia 770 sources...

[From: Acadia Secure Networks]

Devesh,

the following commentary from Andrew is somewhat disconcerting since it 
suggests that Nokia is somehow holding back on openness:

    "I have to say
    > Maemo and the Nokia 770 have been disappointing in terms of openness"
      

Assuming that his disappointment is warranted, what has held Nokia back 
in terms of "complete openness" in the context suggested by the above 
comment? Is there some commercial concern that, by being more "open", 
that Nokia will be somehow more vulnerable to competitors developing 
similar hardware that runs the same software platform as the N770? It is 
not even clear to me that it is legally possible under the terms of 
licensing for Linux based software to take the parts of Linux that one 
likes but to hold other parts back in order to retain a competitive 
advantage in the marketplace.

Best Regards,

 

John Holmblad

 

Acadia Secure Networks

GSEC Gold, GCWN Gold, GGSC-0100, NSA-IAM, NSA-IEM

 

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devesh.kothari at nokia.com wrote:
> ext Andrew Barr wrote:
>
>   
>> On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 18:47 -0300, Alessandro Ikeuchi wrote:
>>     
>>> ...
>>>       
>> While I certainly don't agree with the angry tone used, I have to say
>> Maemo and the Nokia 770 have been disappointing in terms of openness. It
>> seems to me that Nokia has opened just enough to get apps ported and/or
>> written for the device, which in turn sells more devices, or at least
>> that appears to be the plan. Nothing has come of recurring requests for
>> information about the Bluetooth hardware (e.g. for headset support), Ogg
>> Vorbis support, or Gstreamer/DSP multimedia internals in general. Some
>> things that are missing from the Subversion repo don't even make sense,
>> e.g. there is no hardware secrets or patents associated with them (at
>> least as far as I know) The media player apps come to mind here.
>>
>>     
> What I agree is that we need to strengthen the architecture documents
> BTW getting strarted with multimedia development doc was updated
> http://maemo.org/platform/docs/multimedia/getting_started.html
> (section Plugin development) which describes how to enable  ogg-vorbis
>  
>
>   
>> Maemo really isn't open in the sense that we're used to: like a
>> traditional Linux distribution. It seems to be more of an SDK plus
>> things that were required to be open, e.g. due to licensing terms.
>>
>>     
> I think one of the reason for that could also be attributed that most
> general linux distributions are targetted to PC/laptop which have
> relatively well defines standardized hardware architecture. What we have
> tried to do with maemo is
> - provide a common development environment and tools for Nokia 770 and
> future devices (SB, rootstraps etc)
> - provide (as a priority) to enable application development
> - enable experimentation like ability to compile your own kernel, create
> your own rootfs and all the benifits that could be leveraged from a
> debian based component package management system
>
> Now what we are concentrating on, beside improving the above is to
> enable participation and contribution in stages to different parts of
> maemo, starting with HAF/Sardine which I hope would extend. The starting
> up and adoption barrier for sardine are being recognized, and we are now
> trying to make it easy to adopt and use sardine, without sacrificing the
> genral device usability. This would enable the patches or feature
> implementations by community to be made and tested on the latest svn
> codebase, so the component owners can integrate/accept/reject them.
> There has been excellent work done for enabling dual boot by Frantisek Dufka
> http://maemo.org/maemowiki/BootMenu
>
> which I hope would enable the experimentation atleast in the large area
> of HAF/sardine (comprising the majority of the middleware stack like
> gtk+, theming, desktop, tasknavigator, control panel, application
> installer etc) to happen on MMC based sardine rootfs
>
> Devesh
>
>
>   
>> This is unfortunate, because it creates a burden on the Nokia employees
>> working on this project. They are the only ones who can add many
>> requested features or fix bugs, so in many cases people complain to the
>> mail list because they cannot take care of things themselves. You don't
>> see patch mails on the maemo-* lists. That's to say nothing of ideas
>> people have had but been unable to implement--trivial stuff that would
>> improve the Maemo environment but may not have been discussed on the ML.
>>
>> To me, the open-source economy (or whatever) that makes some projects so
>> great doesn't work here because the "community" is relegated in large
>> part to the role of application developer. The best you can do to
>> improve some parts of Maemo is suggest it and hope someone at Nokia
>> takes it up.
>>
>> These are just my impressions from informal observation and occasional
>> participation in this endeavor. If you think I'm way off base or crazy
>> or something, please feel free to tell me or ignore me.
>> --
>> Andrew Barr | http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/~andrew/
>> <http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/%7Eandrew/>
>>
>> "Buzzword detected (core dumped)"
>>   -- seen on linux-kernel at vger.kernel.org
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>>     
>
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>   
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