As long as this topic has been brought up again, I'd like to just ask a couple questions to anyone who can shed light on them. I can completely follow the logic for why wifi (and bluetooth and dsp) drivers ended up closed source: NDAs, patents and license agreements are a minefield in the hardware world, especially in embedded systems. Likewise, commercial flash support is an unfortunate necessity for the majority of the NIT's target demographic. This is nothing new, and from a business point of view is a pretty simple choice to make when push comes to shove (ie, do we want GPL drivers for wireless or the best/cheapest wireless chipset we can get?).

What I don't understand is all the ridiculous little bits of code here and there that are closed source. Things like the backlight and volume statusbar applets use publicly available APIs to control the hardware, however for new programmers they provide helpful examples for to write a proper statusbar applet. Ask rm_you how much time he spent trying to figure out how Nokia got them to look the way they did. Also, the browser UI, which seemed to be open source for a while then went back to being closed source: What's up with that? I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that the closed source part has nothing to do with flash support. And random things like the "Web" menu on the lefthand panel and many of the home applets. And what's the business case behind making the image viewer closed source? It depends on open source libs for image loading and processing, but the part that would make a great, simple example of a hildonized app is closed.

I'm not blaming anyone and I'm not some open source zealot. I understand that it's Nokia's code and they have the right to do whatever they want with it. And really this is all somewhat rhetorical, as I think I know the reason the PHBs don't want to have this stuff open source: competitive advantage. If Intel is going to get their MID into the same market as the Internet Tablet, then Nokia wants them to at least have to spend the R&D cash rewriting all the apps they'll need.

Anyways, that's all, I'll shut up now.

-John