The announcement of Nokia's offer of bonuses to its Meego programmers gave me a nice bout of paranoia. (Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.) Already referenced on this thread, here is a brief summary of the news item:

"Nokia is offering salary increases and bonuses to its MeeGo engineers to keep them working on development of the company’s first MeeGo smartphone (N950), according to Finnish reports. The smartphone is due to be launched sometime this year. The reports claim that Nokia has not told its developers what tasks they will be given after the N950."

What this reminded me of was what Microsoft did to Borland in the early 1990's. At the time, Borland was the dominant PC database software vendor, and Microsoft had not yet developed Access. To cripple the competition, Microsoft hired away a huge number of Borland's programmers by offering them much more money. The point was not to develop Microsoft Access, but simply to destroy Borland. Microsoft didn't even put the programmers to work on database projects, but rather moved them to fields unrelated to their prior work, so that it wouldn't be vulnerable to claims that it stole trade secrets.

I heard that story in 1996 from a database designer I'd hired for my small company. I just looked it up for the first time and found these articles. According to Microsoft: Resistance is Futile, "Microsoft hired 34 of the ailing software developer's key employees with huge signing bonuses, some in excess of $1 million." See also Borland to wield tools against Microsoft ("A software powerhouse in the '80s and early '90s, Borland saw its fortunes collapse, largely as a result of competition with Microsoft, which undercut Borland's pricing and hired away 34 of its key executives.")

So I wonder about the real reason that Nokia would pay bonuses to keep its MeeGo developers in place after it had joined forces with Microsoft and relegated MeeGo to a Disruption Dustbin. Are the bonuses intended to advance MeeGo, or to hamper its development? (Maybe I should say "or to disrupt its development".)

Despite having been a lawyer (with only limited work in intellectual property), I've never understood quite how the Open Source license works. For example, I don't get how Android can be based on a Linux core and nonetheless have closed source aspects.

In this paranoid state, I further wonder whether Nokia can use its retained programmers to develop MeeGo-oriented software, and then kill it with copyrights/patents so that critical parts of a future MeeGo OS would be crippled by making them proprietary, unused, and unusable.*


*I've long wondered whether Microsoft had a secret agreement with NetManage (and thereby with its successor companies) to keep EccoPro out of development. EccoPro is a very powerful PIM (with many unusual capabilities, such that Personal Information Manager doesn't really encompass all it can do) that still has a following, even though it's had no development since 1997. NetManage acquired EccoPro in mid-1997 and immediately stopped all further development of it. Numerous people tried to buy EccoPro from NetManage, even as recently as the last couple years, but NetManage wouldn't sell it or open the code, even though it gets no income from the product. The only beneficiaries of NetManage's refusal that I can think of are other PIM vendors, like Microsoft, which sells its much-inferior Outlook.