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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."
" 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
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.
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.
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.
And this make sense. Apple is not about openness. They are about lock-in.
I don't know that that's fair. I mean, I'd agree that Apple isn't "about openness", but not being "about openness" doesn't necessarily mean you're "about lock-in".
It seems to me that Apple is "about" producing the sort of products that Steve Jobs thinks are cool. Sometimes this means being open, sometimes it means being closed. Every once in a blue moon, it means some kind of lock-in, but it's relatively rare.
For example, Apple doesn't really use proprietary file-formats or network protocols. Even when they invent their own, they generally open those new formats and protocols to other developers. The only three things I can think of where they aren't very open are the iPhone, Aqua, and FairPlay DRM. For the iPhone, I expect AT&T is pressuring them to stay closed, for FairPlay we know that the RIAA is pressuring Apple to stay secure. With the UI for OSX, it'd just suck for their business model if all Linux/BSD distros were suddenly able to offer the same GUI.
But it's not as though Apple is engaging in the sort of vendor lock-in that Microsoft is.
...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.
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!".