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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."
After all, Apple itself used open source with OS X (kernel, web browser) mainly because they knew it would irritate Microsoft
Really...I don't recall Apple even being involved at the moment that architectural decision was made. Or are you saying that this was the reason Apple acquired NeXT instead of Be? To irritate the Beast of Redmond? So tragic that historical accuracy is just a few clicks away, and still it eludes everybody.
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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.
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For those intrigued by the ads, here is where to get started for Nokia development. It is important to note that all applications must be signed (expounded on here), with the option (but not requirement) of doing things through a Symbian Signed certificate.
It should also be noted that Nokia's openness to development in comparison to the iPhone has been suitably documented previously.
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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.
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I have to hand it to Nokia. I have had little experience with their products (don't and never have owned a Nokia cell phone), until recently. I'm using a bunch of Nokia N800 Internet Tablets for a project and they're great (cue Tony the Tiger)! Seriously, if you have a Bluetooth phone and don't have an N800, you're missing it. I'm seriously considering dumping voice service and going to a data only package, using the N800 with SIP for my voice needs. I'm looking forward to what Nokia has in the works for the next gen (WiMax maybe), but in the interim I will enjoy the onslaught of great FOSS projects running on the Maemo platform usable on the N800. Nokia has really produced a great open hardware platform in the N800 and I applaud them for their 'walking the walk'.
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.
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I was under the impression that Apple wanted to dump their aging code base and get a tried-and-proven *nix kernel + HTML/JS engine for free.
Flame me all you want, but I haven't noticed a lot of open-source love (or user-love in general) from Apple, and I'm sure they didn't use Darwin because they wanted to annoy Microsoft. If they wanted to annoy Microsoft, they would have joined the Linux/OpenOffice/Firefox-camp.
No matter how Apple fanboys twist reality, bricking a phone is yet another way how Apple rapes their user base. It goes to show that no matter how you abuse your customers, great PR fixes everything.
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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.
Sure they are not phones but tiny computers running linux. I have both of them, I kept the old N770 because I like reading books with it. My N800 has 16GB storage and is my iPod substitute (audio+ video). Unlike the iPod, N800 and N770 are real linux computers and and can do many things in addition to playing audio and video. As an iPod substitute N800 can play many video and audio formats which an ipod cant play (sure after installing suitable Linux software). Unlike the iPod it has integrated stereo loudspeakers, the sdhc cards are hot swapable and many other features the ipods dont have.
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.
Topic: After all, Apple itself used open source with OS X (kernel, web browser) mainly because they knew it would irritate Microsoft.
Um, what?
I can't be sure, but I'd make a guess and think that Apple didn't use open source mainly because it would irritate Microsoft. I'm sure they had acutal valid business reasons for doing so. (lower costs?, community esprit-de-core?,massive army of unpaid labor?, time to market?) Even if it would "irritate" Microsoft (which I can't figure out why Microsoft would care about where Apple gets it's source code from--especially in these days of the new Kinder, Gentler Microsoft) it hardly seems like a valid business move.
Thanks for the daily slap-Microsoft-because-you-can though.
*sigh*
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Whether Nokia itself is open, is neither here nor there. The move is good news, IMHO for one reason - it is turning the question of lock-in into a commercial/marketing issue. It's competitors going after it in advertisements for undue lock in and lock-down is going to be more influential than any discussion-board griping. It may drive Apple to revisit the SDK issue off its own bat, but just as important it may provide Apple with valuable ammunition in discussions with AT&T over the degree of control necessary in terms of allowing 3rd party apps.
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.
WRT to the linked Infoworld article in the post: it's out of date, Apple has since released the source to the Intel Mac OS X kernel.
Not that this will change anyone's opinion one way or the other.
I suggest you learn the GSM spec before making rash comments.
Each phone has a unique number (also known as IMEI). Part of this number is the phone model and manufacturer (similar to the way an Ethernet MAC is tied up to a manufacturer). It is possible to reject a specific phone or specific phone model based on IMEI and the support is there in all GSM networks. While this is rare and not done in anger, it is not impossible to do.
Further to this some of the reject codes a network can give cause a mandatory shutdown of the phone or can even brick the phone and lock the SIM (the last one usually does not work properly as it is not part of the mandatory tests so different manufacturers implement it differently, f.e. old Samsung resets instead of shutting down).
Namely I can think of at least 2 cases. I bet there are plenty of others.
1. 3 UK did this for people buying their elcheapo voice packages and trying to use them using non-3G phones (in the absense of 3G coverage 3 users roam onto O2). The users had their SIMs bricked and the phones shut down remotely.
2. O2 had a blacklist on some very early Motorolas and Benefones which did not quite comply to the spec.
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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.
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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!".
bzzzt! Challenge!
Unsigned apps have an additional screen that you have to OK before it'll install but thats it - no different than trying to use an unsigned driver under Windows.
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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Not only that, but the submission is wrong. That Tom Yager Infoworld piece that is linked was Yager's reaction to the fact that Apple hadn't yet open sourced the Intel kernel, and ran it under the sensationalist headline "Apple closes down OS X".
Except for the fact that at WWDC, they announced that the Intel kernel would continue to be open alongside PowerPC, as it always had.
Anyone is welcome to see for themselves. At the same time, Apple also launched Mac OS Forge, Apple's clearinghouse for its open source projects. Granted, Darwin as an OS is essentially dead, and has been for some time. But Darwin as the core of Mac OS X is alive, and many key components, including the kernel, are open source on both Intel and PowerPC.
And, no, Apple did not do this in "response" to Yager's article or anything similar. Yager just wasn't patient enough to find out what was actually going to happen, and assumed that since he hadn't seen any new Intel kernel source releases before WWDC that Mac OS X must now be "closed" - but he was wrong.
Does Apple do some of its open source stuff for PR or because it's to its advantage? Of course. One would hope that would be obvious. If you don't think Apple is giving back enough to the community, that's another valid, albeit subjective, opinion. I'd advise people to look at some of the Mac OS Forge projects, however.
So, the submission is wrong in both spirit (irritating Microsoft) and in fact (OS X now being "closed"; or any more closed than it has ever been).
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.