[maemo-developers] Corporate ownership of open source projects [LWN]

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi Andrew,

Andrew Flegg wrote:
> On the back of my post, "maemo.org: what next?"[1], it was interesting
> to read in yesterday's LWN that the community around OpenSolaris feels
> very much shut out of internal Sun development processes:
> 
>     http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/280452/8f5b64d861d8f79e/

Indeed - an interesting read. He quoted some very good sources ;-)

> Reading this, it was very striking the number of similarities with
> Nokia's situation with maemo and the maemo community. The above is a
> free link, but I strongly recommend you subscribe to LWN[2] if you
> haven't already.

While I'm still getting to know the maemo community, I think tyhat the
difference is in the goals, and in the means that Nokia are putting at
the disposition of the community to achieve those goals.

Yes, Nokia employees were behind most of the early maemo work. But they
also chose to hire small companies with established free software
credentials (OpenedHand, Imendio, OpenIsmus, Nemein, Kernel Concepts,
the list goes on) to do much of the work. Even though these guys were
working in the beginning under NDA, that's a good sign that Nokia wanted
to work with upstream projects, rather than create a walled garden.

There's also the way that Nokia is now investing in people like myself
Niels, and André and Karsten to ensure that weak points of interaction
between the community and any Nokia technology are identified and
eliminated. I have not been asked to sign any NDAs, and all the work I
do will be out in the open, using information available to the community
(or I will be asking for that information to be made available).

Nokia's goals appear, at least to me, to be clear (but I have no more
information on this than anyone else). Their goal is to make a
commercially successful tablet product, using as much free software as
possible, and providing an open development platform for developers,
thereby creating a vibrant ecosystem of application developers targeting
the maemo platform.

I expect Nokia to keep some control of Hildon and all of the components
on which they build their commercial products. But control comes in many
forms. Just employing a maintainer doesn't imply control (just ask Josh
Berkus or Linus Torvalds) nor does it imply that significant community
contributions are unwelcome.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh at gnome.org