So my hope for a totally free device from Nokia fades. Not that I saw that in the future anyway. Nokia is a commercial company, and giving away things for free will not make them any money. But Ari's speech is a bit harsher than expected. To copy verbatim from Slashdot post:

Jaaksi admitted that concepts like these 'go against the open-source philosophy,' but said they were necessary components of the current mobile industry. 'Why do we need closed vehicles? We do,' he said. 'Some of these things harm the industry but they're here [as things stand]. These are touchy, emotional issues, but this dialogue is very much needed. As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too.'"...

So.... I'm waiting for Pandora now. BTW, did I mention that I find the Gigabyte M528 extremely sweet.

Thanks, Nokia, for the beautiful idea and form factor. I'm sorry, but I don't think I'm gonna stay with you if your future plans are so bleak. No, it's not you, it's me....

Nokia's relationship with OSS has always been a little adversarial. They have never really understood the concepts that drive OSS or the pitfalls of community written software and they will pay the price. Between the iPhone and Android what kind of market will be left for Maemo or Maemo development?

Seems that the text is missing so much context and information for normal person to understand what it is all about. Maybe it's because of how the BusinessWeek article is written? Anyways, in the article in the beginning there is sentence: "the open-source community needed to be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry currently works, because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models". What is the mobile industry? Why it has not moved? Who is the customer?

Well, unfortunately operators are the customers and the main part of the industry - the drivers for functionality. You are just the end user, "sad bad true". For example, the new iPhone is so cheap because the operators buy them and sell them with discount to those suckers who want it cheap and are willing to tie themselves up with long contracts (read: most of the people).

He's not speaking just about Nokia, he is speaking about the whole field where Nokia is just a small part of the machine; play against the machine and you're out.

As I have understood Nokia has not been customizing phones for US operators and the penalty has been small market share - That is what you get when you do not do stuff for the operators. There is the operator, operator has a music shop, operator does what the music business demands them to do -> drm. "Some of these things harm the industry but they're here [as things stand]. These are touchy, emotional issues but this dialogue is very much needed."

Operators are afraid that some phone manufacturers could direct their business, therefore they take part in Android/whatevercheapfastgood to have freedom from the phone manufacturers.. and of course they want to have their drm there to support their music store.. etc.. It's one really big ship and those turn slow. "As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too."

This is just to let you know that I've been addressing my concerns directly to Ari on his blog. We are grown up childs who do not like when somebody messes with our toys .

indeed, i suspect there is a whole lot of "lost in translation" going on here.

(Some of) You guys REALLY need to include context with these provocative posts.

Ari is referring to this new paradigm Nokia is slowly developing, which incorporates as many elements of OSS as the company can work with as well as factoring in the proprietary nature of some hardware and software aspects. It isn't as black and white as some try to frame it.

Anyne who's been following the internet tablets closely enough has seen that many elements that started off closed have been opening... and there will hopefully be more.

I am not anywhere near the official pipeline on this so I don't dare speculate or explain much further. I would just like to see that people involved in the dialog don't rush to judgment. By all means contribute to the discussion, but please don't force it into extreme dead ends by assuming the worst about every development. Patience, please.

I have used and appreciated open source (Linux et al) for quite a long time, and while I'm not in the absolutist camp of Stallman, and while I appreciate Maemo's efforts to improve their transparency ratings, I also fear that Nokia as a company (or the NIT division specifically) can't change their long-held modus operandi fast or far enough to satisfy my needs as a computer user.

Sure, people think the NIT is a neat gadget, but I can't with good conscience recommend it to people as it exhibits a few too many traits of a captive platform. There isn't anything exactly comparable on the market at the moment, but there probably will be before long.

Meanwhile I'll just keep using mine and continue appreciating the efforts of the developers who try to move things forward the best they can.

And what comes to Dr Jaaksi's opinion about OSS needing to adopt ways from the proprietary industry... well I can't seem to find a polite way to put it so nevermind.

Ari just posted a new article to reply on this issue:
http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2008/06/s...ing-to-do.html

Read the link Reggie just posted. Again: some of you are leaping too quickly, too far.

1) http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page
2) http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php
3) http://androidlinux.com/

1: openmoko is the future, not symbian

2: if Nokia screws with QT releases, QT will be freed from Trolltech

3: Android (Google's phone/platform) will force Nokia to be open - or lose market share

don't know what Jaaksi was smoking on tuesday, but comments such as:

As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too.

can certainly be misconstrued... i'm sure he didn't mean that Nokia intends to disregard the GPL, LGPL, or other software licensing schemes, but if so, what 'rules' is he talking about? is Nokia going to 'take' and not 'give back'?

yea, *that* would be really productive, huh? nothing like encouraging developers, right?