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Nokia responds to iPhone by Promoting 'Open'
An anonymous reader writes "Nokia has responded instantly to the iPhone update-bricking fiasco by running a series of flyposter ads pointing out its own hardware and software is open. While this is to be applauded, it'd be better if companies like this opened their products because they truly believed in openness, rather than to beat the competition over the head. After all, Apple itself used open source with OS X (kernel, web browser) mainly because they knew it would irritate Microsoft. Since that initial blow, they've been a lot less eager to promote open source."
in part i agree with this, but even then, if BSD wasn't a solid base to begin with(and this is from a linux user) the marketing wouldn't have been enough.
they used it because it worked.
Does this mean that Nokia will no longer support subsidy locking in their products?
Of course not, they'll keep shipping phones that are locked, so this ad campaign means nothing, and might actually backfire if enough people stop and say "Now, waitaminute..."
" it'd be better if companies like this opened their products because they truly believed in openness, rather than to beat the competition over the head"
The purpose of a company is generally to make money, not to crusade for some political stance. The investors want a good return on their investment, not a philosophy. You are living in a dream world if you think the number 1 aim of most companies isn't to maximise their profits. Any kind of 'belief' about open or closed source etc is very much a secondary concern, and always will be. If it wasn't they would quickly find themselves losing market share and customers to the the competition.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
You know, I heard that because Honda has a hybrid car, everyone else made Hybrid cars just to piss them off!! I Microsoft eats babies! My God! That isn't a tin foil hat, it's a brain slug!!
Seriously, companies like Nokia that "open" their products need to be rewarded regardless of their motivations, we can't change certain qualities of for-profit companies in a for-profit world.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Companies exist to make money. If being more open allows them to make more money, then then they "truly" believe in it. QED.
Corporations are amoral amalgamations of many different kinds of people with different goals; they are not the single-minded overlords that so many working folk like to paint them to be. The only thing they agree on is making a profit.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
It's disingenuous, because we all know that any handset is as open as the network allows. Which is to say, not very. If a handset manufacturer won't agree to their capricious whims, they just won't carry it. Insta-death for Mr Phone.
Although you can download 3rd party applications to my phone (Nokia N80 on Vodafone), that's only to the extent that Vodafone allows.
Nokia might like to think they're open. In reality, it's just not their decision, alas.
People get confused about Apple and open source. Apple is mainly an open-source consumer, what they produce/contribute is basically the bare minimum that they have to.
And this make sense. Apple is not about openness. They are about lock-in. This is part of what lets them provide such a smooth and simple experience (and charge the highest margins in the industry).
So, it's about time that Apple competitors started pointing this out to people.
But, it's an indication of powerful Apple has become that the #1 company in the cell phone industry would have to start attacking a company that has just entered it.
...it'd be better if companies like this opened their products because they truly believed in openness, rather than to beat the competition over the head. Does it matter why a company actually adopts open software? Isn't the fact that it's being used more important? Also, what's the harm in a business finding that open software is a way to get an edge on the competition?Here's another situation where intellectual property laws really make the market unfriendly to both consumers and producers. Apple has a fantastic interface, but it is really nothing new and exciting -- just a mashup of previous functions that have existed in human interface design for years, if not decades. Yet competitors can't mimic anything because of the outrageously inept intellectual property laws that exist in the States and the in the International Law community.
I'm anti-IP completely, but I do understand why people feel there is a basic need for some sort of anti-competition protection. Since I feel the market always provides a great balance between consumers and producers, it is legislation that ends up harming both sides.
Nokia makes a great product. I had the N80 for a few weeks when it came out, but the interface was lacking and it just didn't flow well (too sluggish, IMHO). I still use my HTC Trinity, but even there I'm not 100% happy. There's so much more I'd like to see, a mixup of various interface and software designs from Apple, Nokia, Motorola, HTC and Samsung -- yet this can't happen because it would encroach on whatever patent rights each producer has, leaving us consumer with far-less-than-perfect products, and leaving producers unable to fill what the market desires.
I tried the iPhone for a week, and it also wasn't perfect. The lack of 3G is significant, the locking to a network is ridiculous, and the overall feel of the product was great but just not cohesive enough to be my primary device. I still travel with 6+ devices (I travel at least 2-3 days a week) and I know I could combine everything into 2 devices, had it not been for the ridiculous patent laws we have today.
There's no fix to this, and if anything things will get only worse as the companies merge and bring with them even more power in convincing the State that we need MORE laws to fix a problem that is caused by too many regulations in the first place.
Yes, sometimes I feel like this is not Slashdot but some kindergarten. Serioulsly, here you the laws of Economics are sometimes weaker than the "my father is stronger than yours" laws.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
There has been some negative press about Symbian signing recently - with some freeware developers giving up on it entirely.
http://www.symbian-freak.com/news/007/08/symbian_freeware_scene_under_serious_crises.htm
Its rediculous to expect end users to sign applications themselves before they can install them on their phones.
Series 60 3rd Edition is Symbian OS 9.1. Series 60 refers to the UI toolkit, not the operating system. And the Communicator-branded devices have traditionally used a different UI called Series 80.
And for all this whining about digital signing, remember that it was a direct response to all the whining about potential viruses that made it mandatory in S60 v3. There are iPhone promoters who will tell you that security is the primary justification for the closed nature of the iPhone, and in their very next breath tell you that the signing model is another drawback to S60, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry. I'm sorry, you can't have it both ways.
Yes, it sucks for the hobbyist, but these three platforms let you generate and install developer certificates freely. And for anyone who does this commercially, the signing expense is really in time, not money. I'm glad they're doing it; what annoys me is that it is dependent on the digital certificate racket run by companies like Verisign, and being abused by carriers to cripple device capabilities.
...or care about things that matter a lot, but for completely wrong reasons.
Open systems, open standards and open source are important -- but as a platform for innovation, not a pissing match.
I think any support Apple had for the open source concept went out the window when they started making sweetheart deals with companies in other industries. iTunes was hugely successful--but in order to make it work with the RIAA, Apple put in DRM. With its success from the iPod, the iPhone was almost guaranteed to be a success. But they signed this deal with AT&T, which is a complete anathema to anything remotely approaching open source--just ask the poor schlubs who are carrying around $500 bricks.
The thing is, if Apple *wants* to support "open source" ideas, they can--they just have to choose to make it a company principle and be aggressive about it. They're successful enough that they can make it work. But the reality is, they have no incentive to do so.
Compare the situation with IBM, who is heavily backing FOSS. In fact, doing so has likely saved the company; their proprietary products simply weren't doing well, and the company was a mess in the 90s. AIX, OS/2--really, the company had very little going for it. Nobody was adopting their technologies. So they started investing in technology that people were adopting--Linux, Java, and so forth. Many of which were either open source or OS-friendly (Java).
Apple has no similar motivation to go the OS route. People are buying their technology, in droves. They have no reason to open up the iPod or iPhone API, or stop the DRM implementation in iTunes (though this may change as non-DRM competition gets stronger).
For that to change, either Apple has to adopt a pro-FOSS ideology, or find themselves in a situation where a closed-source viewpoint is hurting their bottom line.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
OS X is based on open source (I believe this decision was made by engineers at NeXT, way before Apple had anything to do with it), and the user space is BSD, so you can do, basically, anything software-wise, that you can do in BSD. Apple hides stuff so that normal users don't get confused, but nothing is locked down, you can happily sudo bash and do whatever you like.
Sure the license says you can only install OS X on 1 machine (it may actually say 2, but I forget), but there is nothing technically stopping you from installing it on 100 machines, there are no Activation, serial numbers, etc. You can easily make a boot CD in OS X, just like in Linux; you have to do a bunch of hacks to make this happen in Windows, as it is much more locked down. Heck, my old firewire iPod has OS X on it, and I can boot off of it. This is all very similar to Linux.
Safari, isn't like IE at all, it is based from open source, which they contribute back to, and it very standards compliant.
Most everything in OS X is standards base, except for Quicktime (who cares, use VLC or mplayer, just like in Linux) related stuff. Unlike Windows that likes to use it's own formats for everything. Every app in OS X can create PDF files, for free. If, for example, you take screen shot, it saves it as a PNG file. Most programs use EPS, rather than what Microsoft did, which is create their own format (WMF/EMF). There are many examples of this.
I use MacPorts all the time, which if you aren't familiar is a port of Ports from BSD. It's like apt-get, but it compiles the apps, similar to emerge in Gentoo.
Apple does a really good job of exposing all their stuff as APIs. This is why you see shareware apps on OS X, that have some really advanced features. All of their development tools are free, and come with the OS; I don't see Microsoft giving away Visual Studio with Windows. From a developer's perspective, which I am, OS X is very transparent and open.
In regards to iPods and iPhones, which I guess is what most people think of when they think of Apple, they are much more closed then all their competitors; so I understand why people have this perception. I guess I just don't care about music players much, sure I have an iPod, but I don't use it enough for me to care that I can't install a game on it (without paying). My computer matters a whole lot to me, and OS X, works really well for me; I do wish that I could build my own Mac, but of course, if that were possible Apple would loose one of their main advantages (controlling the hardware to guarantee their software works as they like it to ). If I had to switch back to Linux on my workstation, that'd be fine too, I prefer OS X, but Linux is very nice as well.
I read the thing at:
http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/TSS000431_-_Requesting_extended_capabilities_set_for_Developer_Certificates
I found that racket absolutely disgusting.
Are people so desperately needing to develop for symbian ?
Think of the shiny new APIs that the iPhone currently uses (Core Animation and resolution independence being the big ones) and look at what's not in Tiger but is in Leopard.
Like hell Apple is going to expose those APIs to commoners like us before the big 10.5 release. Developers pay big bucks to have access to that shit before the rest of us and Apple isn't about to kill of that rather lucrative little market. Watch how either XCode 3.0 or XCode 3.1 after Leopard's release supports the iPhone as a target architecture and watch Apple tout it as "So you can write an OS X app? You can write an iPhone app!". Also stay tuned for the retarded Digg post that says "WE WIN! APPLE BOWS DOWN TO THE PRESSURE AND OPENS UP THE IPHONE TO THIRD PARTY APPS!".
Let me just point out that WebKit, the Apple HTML rendering engine, which is based upon KHTML, the origional KDE HTML rendering engine, has a Subversion repository from which you can download code, that you can submit patches just like you can for Firefox, and that the code is now used by KDE, AtheOS, Apple, and ... wait for it ...
NOKIA.
WebKit
Ars Technical article about unforking of KHTML and WebKit
Aplications Using WebKit
Nokia S60 website page for WebKit based web browser (yeah, the registrant for that website is Nokia).
So, you see, things are a lot more complicated than some folks seem to think.
Here's what I don't get about Symbian signing: the extra effort of self signing an application for your own phone seems like a complete waste of time and energy to me, as it doesn't really add any security benefits over a "WARNING: You are about to run an unsigned application for the first time" dialog. Why did they bother? The excuse given is that then someone can explicitly revoke that certificate and the phones will magically stop trusting the app, but if you are distributing that development version of the app (as opposed to using it in house), you should be signing it with a development build key anyway, not self signing it with an untrusted key, so that argument just doesn't pass muster with me.
I'm also a little annoyed about the $200 annual fee for the "privilege" of getting to write apps for the platform. That cuts out any possibility of a small business ever making money off of writing apps for the phone. You pretty much have to be able to guarantee $200 with of sales to break even, which either means small apps cost way more than they are worth or they don't get written at all. At least they make an exception for freeware authors, but I find it really hard to consider anything that has mandatory annual fees for developers to be "open". That doesn't meet my definition of "open".
IMHO, the definition of an open platform is one in which anyone can write software for it without fee. Period. If the telecom providers are really so terrified about the stability of their network that they require this level of paranoia, that speaks volumes about how poorly designed their data networks are.... The cell phone manufacturers shouldn't be protecting them with signed applications. They should be exposing the cell providers' incompetence for everyone to see. Maybe then we would get a provider in the picture that actually knows something about designing a robust data network....
Put another way, the first telecom to dispose of the signed application requirement will immediately win me away from AT&T Wireless. Consider that a challenge to all the telcos out there. We don't want excuses. We want a network that works. Give us one, and we'll go there. Keep this crap up, and we'll start our own. Google 700 MHz, here I come.
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Wrong. If they're doing it for cynical, cutthroat competitive reasons, it means they have a genuine incentive to stick with an open approach, rather than a flimsy ideological reason. Business doesn't have ethics. You can trust a business to aim for maximum profit, you can not trust them to stick to a philosophy just for the hell of it.
That sounds good but isn't really accurate. NeXT was indeed based upon BSD, but didn't run an open source program, and didn't need to because BSD wasn't GPL. Microsoft used BSD's network stack, but didn't release anything because it similarly didn't need to do so. NeXT used BSD because it worked.
When Apple bought NeXT, it was already hosting some limited open source projects, including MkLinux from early 1996. That was a GPL project hosting the Linux kernel + GNU on top of the OSF microkernel (with some similarities to Mach+BSD). To suggest that Apple had to buy NeXT nearly a year later to get any interest in open source is therefore simply wrong.
Further, after Apple acquired NeXT, it had no obligation to release anything in NeXT's portfolio. Apple actually continued its own unrelated open source projects, including NetSprockets for cross platform gaming (an open source alternative to networking/input portions of DirectX, mostly rejected by the market).
Apple released the core OS of Mac OS X as Darwin in 2000, shortly before the first commercial release of Mac OS X and four years after buying NeXT. Darwin significantly improved upon NeXTSTEP 4, and updated it with a 5 years of newer code that had been released by the *BSDs. Very little of that code was under the GPL, and had Apple not decided that open source was in its own interests, it could have easily released a completely closed Mac OS X with very little work, or by simply isolating the difficult to replicate bits like GCC.
So Apple's open source programs weren't inherited from NeXT (which had none), and weren't forced by the GPL. They also weren't to irritate Microsoft, because Apple desperately needed Microsoft as a partner between 1998 and 2000. Why would Microsoft even care? MS doesn't hate open source any more than the Saudis "hate our freedom." (They hate their own freedom, remember?) Microsoft doesn't hate open source, it hates competition, and in the locked up PC monopoly, the only real competition is volunteer work.
Apple released its various code projects because they made business sense. Sometimes the code it released was to gain traction behind a strategy, such as when in opened up QuickTime Streaming Server to find interest in a product that would have otherwise died. Sometimes it's to allow developers access to code, such as with Darwin/Mac OS X. Sometimes its because good code has already been written and it makes no sense for Apple to reinvent a new wheel, such as Safari/WebKit based on KDE's KHTML.
Trying to attribute malice to Apple related to its open source projects is like hating Starbucks for trying to sell shade grown coffee. It's valid to feel righteous for hating chain stores or to have the opinion that Starbucks coffee isn't that good, but trying to vilify a big corporation when it does something decent--even if it's in its own interests--is a bit too much to have to listen to.
If the troll posting the original blurb had meant to say that Apple used open source to beat the crap out of Microsoft's OS development plans, then yes, that would be accurate. By leveraging open source, Apple can focus its efforts on things it does well, and incorporate lots of community development related to security, networking, and OS performance, which happen to be the three core competencies of the Open/Net/FreeBSD.
Apple's Open Source Assault
Microsoft's Unwinnable War on Linux and Open Source
Microsoft gives you a very stripped down version of Visual Studio (Express Edition), which has all sorts of limitations (remember them ordering a MVC to remove a add-on they created from their site?). This is hardly the same as Apple distributing XCode, for free, with every disc of OS X. Not a stripped down version, but the entire thing. As a person who actually buys Visual Studio (for $700 for each programmer), I'm fully aware that it is not free. Sorry, but as long as OSX refuses to install on anything but Apple hardware it doesn't look open to me at all. I fail to see why it should matter whether or not it's partly derived from an open source distribution It isn't more open because it's derived from an open source project, it's because a lot of OS X is an open-source project (Darwin). You can download it, run it on any hardware that you like, fork it, etc. Like all open-source projects. There are parts of OS X that are not open-source, and they can only be run on Apple hardware (legally, not technically). Heck, Nokia uses Webkit on some phones, another open-source project of Apple's. I'd like to fork the Windows kernel, where can I find the open-source version of that again?
If you don't see that having a large amount of an OS as open source is more open than having none of your OS open-source, well than I really don't know why I'm trying to explain it to you; I don't live in your black and white world.
While T-Mobile is the other major US based character, those of us who travel a lot often have a number of SIM cards for different countries: I have one for the UK and one for Mexico. I swap them around all the time.