Thread: Closed Source Packages in Maemo
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qgil is offline qgil
2009-09-25 , 19:26
Posts: 3,105 | Thanked: 11,088 times | Joined on Jul 2007 @ Mountain View (CA, USA)
#151
Originally Posted by R-R View Post
That is an interesting problem and one of the more important one in the end for the long term viability of an open platform... If users can't get to the hardware it's game over. Hopefully hardware manufacturer could get pressured by such big players as Nokia to release source, at least a year or two after its bleeding edge chips are out ... ?
If the hardware vendors can't make business then it's really game over. Their current business model is mostly based on licensing. It's a tough market of big investments that require big operations to be profitable. The competition is fierce. And still free software is doing some progress in that area as well, so someone is putting the brain to work with business models considering OSS.

I'm wondering if, Nokia being at the center of the real platform direction / innovation, shouldn't right now completely aim for a 100% FOSS platform...
"The aim? To bring to life a shared vision to create the most proven, open and complete mobile software platform - and to make it available for free."
http://www.symbian.org/about/

Maybe a temporary license where we can see the source but not share it might make sense so you can still sue rip-offs and after a while completely free it? I don't know what might work but it's worth thinking about ...
http://qt.gitorious.org/qt/qt/blobs/...IEW.COMMERCIAL

The proprietary possibility has to be left as to be able to create an app market for those who still think their great idea is worth 3.99$ and creating a real diversified market of license type.
http://store.ovi.com/
http://maemo.org/downloads/

it will take time to build a community for an e-mail client used on what is right now a fringe platform...
Isn't more or less the same for the rest of pre-installed Maemo applications? Doesn't make sense to focus first on increasing the user base by selling more devices and getting a cross-platform API in place? Then when you cross the critical mass of user and developers is when you can have more promising foundations for free software collaboration at an application level.

I think Nokia did a great job with the community and really is going in the right direction, it might just have to learn a few more things about how to deal with a community.
Yes, we are all learning here about community and about business as well.

I'm wondering, is the new browser front-end (GUI) in Maemo not FOSS ? (I know the back-end now is, and that's great!)
But, If not Why not?
How is that different than the media player which is even more of a commodity to me?
If they were commodity you would find several options to choose at the same level or better. This happens in the traditional desktop, but it's still not the case in the mobile. The foundations and the API are all public so there is no hard obstacle for the free software community to commoditize them. As mentioned before, even Nokia is a contributor supporting directly or indirectly projects like Mozilla or Canola.

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