<br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/6/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Quim Gil</b> <<a href="mailto:quim.gil@nokia.com">quim.gil@nokia.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Just to clarify some roles here:</blockquote><div><br><-- snip --> <br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Take the best from each of us, that's my advice. We are just as good
<br>people and as well intentioned as you. And we work at Nokia, yes.</blockquote><div><br></div></div><br>I probably haven't been lurking on this list long enough to have "permission" to comment on this ;-) but even with the short time I've been here I've seen some interesting posts.
<br><br>I think part just has to do with the old "It's not free unless it's ALL FREE" point of view. And part has to do with "Company X didn't address the fact that Y didn't work for me by addressing me directly by name" or else "Company X didn't address my problem in Internet time (
i.e. time required for one e-mail to traverse the world, i.e. < 1 sec.) Most don't realize that's really only a fraction of a percent of the total people out there, but they tend to be the most verbal.<br><br>
I say "Company X" because it's not just Nokia. You see it on boards everywhere about every tech gadget company, but I doubt that every tech gadget company really sucks as bad as that myopic view says.<br><br>
For a different point of view, I was instrumental over the past few months of getting Canon Japan to agree to release the driver specifications for their scanners to the SANE developers. It's taken 7 months of prodding, and finally I threatened to switch all my scanners (I have about 14, all that cost over $4500) to Bell + Howell simply because the SANE crew thinks they'll have support for B+H soon.
<br><br>Canon still wants an NDA out of the SANE developer, just to allow him to see the control codes they send over USB to tell the scanner to feed a page. Something that _could_ be reverse engineered given time.<br><br>
So, seeing Nokia work so closely with open source development is great in my mind.<br><br>Sure, we all wish that every aspect of the device was open source, but if so you'd see a Chinese knock-off within a few weeks that would be half the price and total crap that would break in a few weeks. That would end up reflecting bad on the market in general at this point, and discourage Nokia from releasing any more products. Some day I see things moving more that direction, but it's got to come in stages, both to give big companies time to embrace the idea, and to give consumers time to adapt to the idea as well and recognize brand value.
<br><br>If you had told me 5 years ago that any large company would release any device like this and open-source any part of the system, it would have blown me away.<br><br>And as far as hardware or compatibility or documentation goes, keep in mind, Nokia is still a large company, and they tend to move slower than you do. Most people have their narrow definition of job function, and they can't expand beyond that without supervisory direction. It wouldn't be a company if that wasn't so. As owner of more than one large "small business" company, I can attest to that. I've gone from 6 employees to 45 in a matter of 2 years, and it's important to get that layer of bureaucracy and control or else the machine doesn't work right.
<br><br>Just my $.02 that nobody asked for ;-)<br><br>-Tony<br>