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Posts: 47 | Thanked: 7 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#40
Originally Posted by benny1967 View Post
marcinw, do you have any idea how old the Maemo project actually is? How much Nokia struggled in the past to get things right - playing by the rules of an open community, aligning to upstream projects (Maemo isn't a universe of its own, it upstream, upstream and upstream) while still at the same time protecting the commercial interests of their stakeholders? My dear... All the stories and ups and downs we had since they announced the 770.

You know what? No, Nokia is not an open source project. It doesn't even claim to be one. And: Maemo is not something they do because they want to help the free software movement. They do it for business reasons. But: They've learned during the last years that if they want to be commercially successful with a product based on free software, you have to be part of a community, you have to play by the rules, you must earn the trust of other projects.

The community, OTOH, had to learn that some things don't change within a company like Nokia and you can't expect them to - I don't know - give up all their patents, never use DRM again and GPL the last piece of code they find in the vaults of their software archives.

There's 10.000 things about Nokia in general and Maemo in particular that I don't like too much... that drive me nuts, actually.
But I trust them when they say they're serious about being as open as they can. I trust them when they say they would like to be even more open and hope that they can be in the future. And I trust them when they say they're committed to openness.
Yes ! Generally we think similiary. They're not so "open source friendly" like they're say. What's what this thread is about...

And we differ in one thing: during 10 years they showed, that they're not committed to openness.