Thread: Ari Jaaski says OSS must play nice with DRM and locked parts
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qgil is offline qgil
2008-06-14 , 21:06
Posts: 3,105 | Thanked: 11,088 times | Joined on Jul 2007 @ Mountain View (CA, USA)
#56
Originally Posted by vvaz View Post
One scenario is coming to my mind and was mentioned by Ari (although in another context): big dump of un-announced code into Qt codebase.
Fair enough, it is sensible that some people not knowing what has been said and what is going on could be worried about this possibility. Let's look at it then.

Quoting the press release on January, when the acquisition process was announced:

Nokia strives for an open approach to technology that will encourage and support innovation in the industry, enable fast adoption of new technologies and advance healthy competition. Nokia embraces open source technology and will take further the open source development culture found in Trolltech.
And from the Open letter to KDE and the Open Source community:

Trolltech has benefited greatly from the feedback the community has been providing while using Qt to develop free software. We respect the symbiotic relationship Qt has with the community and we wish to continue and enhance this relationship.

(...)

Nokia is committed to continue Trolltech’s current open source engagements, including honoring the KDE Free Qt agreement, and we will seek to strengthen our support of KDE in the future. As a first step Nokia will apply to become a Patron of KDE.

That was the promise of Nokia to the Trolltech team and Qt users in the industry and the open source community. The current open development model has been good enough to produce this technology interesting to Nokia and many customers, in the commercial and community contexts. Break this promise, break this development model and... What would Nokia win? What would Nokia lose? What would be the business benefit?
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