[maemo-users] Nokia: Linux Needs to Learn Business

[From: Steve Brown]

> From: Andre Klapper <aklapper at openismus.com>
> Am Freitag, den 13.06.2008, 16:28 -0400 schrieb Steve Brown:
> > No joke; I don't want my phone to be like a car, I hate cars. It's
> > kind of sad that Jaaksi feels he needs to teach open source developers
> > something, instead of learn from them. First off: we don't want to be
> > taught about Nokia's business rules, that's between Nokia and their
> > partners.
>
> so you want to ignore the business reality out there? you personally can
> do that, but a company can't. it's always easy to state stuff as this,
> but a company has to care about its position in the market and about
> gaining benefits.


Business reality? *looks over at OpenMoko* Although it isn't mine to worry
about, some companies (smaller ones than nokia, even) seem to be doing fine
in this business reality. What's better, OpenMoko seem to be delivering open
handhelds and not excuses (or semi-open handhelds). I'm not going to draw
out a roadmap of what Nokia should do to conquer the open source handheld
market, because frankly, there is a lot that we aren't told about Nokia's
business (and I love how some people on here are pretending that they have
all of these details about it). But, on one side I have Nokia saying it is
almost impossible, and then OpenMoko simply DOING it. So, the real business
reality is that it IS possible, and Nokia isn't doing it for other reasons.
All of which is totally fine, I'll go for the open one, not the closed one
that says "well, atleast we tried".

> Now he just wants to get and not give
>
> and that is just plain wrong, if you take a look at the contributions
> that Nokia and its partners have given back e.g. to the GNOME software
> stack. just take a look at the ChangeLog files.


I'm sorry for the confusion, I was talking more about giving us
non-drm'd/locked down phones, not them contributing to OSS. Software
contributions are great (well... that's for another thread), but the problem
we're talking about now seem to stem more from hardware and the drivers to
make them work. That is what this whole thread is about, right? Are those
not the source of these (alleged) business problems?

I did read Jaaksi's blog just now, and I'm happy to see that he isn't as
ignorant as the article made him sound.

-Steve
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