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Nokia Urges Linux Developers To Be Cool With DRM
superglaze writes in to note that according to Nokia's software chief, its plans for open source include getting developers to accept things like DRM, commercial IP rights, and SIM locks. "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.'"
I'm sorry, it sounds like you have your head firmly rooted somewhere dark and unnatural.
"These things suck and hurt both you and us, and we won't bend on that. But we want you to work for us for free anyway."
Holy cow man, listen to yourself. This is our playground and we give you an opportunity to play in it for free; in return we purchase the goods you produce as a result. You play by our rules or we take our playground and our purchasing power to someone who will.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Write your own damn code!
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
"We want to ditch your rules but have you live by our rules. We know it's wrong and bad for consumers but too bad. We want to lock in our profits".
Pretty typical attitude in the industry I'd say.
Huh? A corporation talking about emotion?
It's about money. It's about vendor lock-in, it's about customer control and about avoiding competition.
They want cheap/free (the beer kind) software, but under their sole control, without allowing the user of the software to apply it to their needs. Sorry, OSS doesn't swing that way.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Are you shitting me? IP rights are one thing (we don't expect people not to respect IP rights, we may disagree a bit on how extensive those rights should be), but SIM locks are an anticompetitive abomination, and this guy is a moron if he expects intelligent developers ever to like them. They're all about vendor lock-in, and removal of consumer choice. I bought my phone independently of a contract. It cost more but means I just put in whatever company's SIM I want and I switch providers that easily. Nokia, if you don't like that, fuck off. (It's a Nokia phone)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I RTFA, and it's actually an accurate summary of his speech. It really sounds like the guy honestly believes the crap he's spewing.
John
... as long as it doesn't interfere with my rights to reprogram anything using any free/libre software and doesn't intefere with my fair use rights to use the content I pay for.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules."
Sounds like they are not yet in a position to use open-source technologies.
It would be interesting to see if turnabout is fair play. I'd love to have a free high-end smartphone, but that means taking up an expensive monthly airtime contract. Instead, I'll just declare that I am "not yet ready to play by the rules", take the benefit of the free handset now, and later on I'll sign up for a contract when I am ready to play by the rules.
OK?
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Educated? I'd say LARTed.
Can you imagine what a cell could become if it is "OSS friendly"? Yes, you will most likely not lock your customers into having to use it, but here's a really novel, radical and completely unthinkable idea: They just might want to use your product because it caters to their needs.
I know it is so last century, but how about making a product again that the customer wants to buy instead of trying to force him to buy it with vendor lock-in snares?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If I don't control it, I don't own it.
If I don't own it, I can't trust it.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
1) encrypt something
2) send encrypted data to their computer
3) send key to their computer
4) wait for somebody to take a memory dump
5) NO profit
Even if somebody was to make a binary blob to prevent memory dumps at kernel level, all you need is to run linux in a virtual machine (i hear its good at that) or use some rootkit.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Other plans include getting the open-source community to make closed source software while still working for free. And also get nokia "a pony" (*).
Oh wait. They want DRM, which needs the software to be closed source. So I guess that's already what they are asking for.
And the "we need closed vehicles" bit? Worst car analogy ever. If you want to "close" your music, you encrypt it. What nokia wants are cars that locks from the outside when you get in, so you can't escape from them. Not sure that we really need those.
(*)fake quote. Keep the pony if you've already bought it.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
"These are touchy, emotional issues"
No, they are not. There are very rational and well-explained reasons for being against DRM, closed platforms, vendor lock-in and the like.
I'm not even going to repeat them here, because I assume them to be well-known (certainly to the Slashdot audience).
So that's some nice bullshitting and spin doctoring going on there, but no. Really, no.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Interesting you say that. My thoughts were more along the lines of Open Source is to the Native Americans as Nokia is to the U.S. Government. That is to say there's many Open Source organizations and no single collective leader over all of them, making it very difficult to negotiate a, to resume the metaphor, peace treaty.
The fortunate thing is that I don't believe there is anything to be the proverbial bison that can be killed off to, in turn, wipe out Open Source.
No. They are worried that the ones who want the DRM, the carriers, will not buy the phones.
In many ways. The article notes that "because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.", "they (drm/simlock/subsidisies) were necessary components of the current mobile industry", and "Some of these things harm the industry but they're here".
The conclusion: Instead of the industry evolving, the programmers (namely, the Open Source crowd) need to go back to the old outdated model.
When you recognise yourself that your business model is flawed and doesn't work, the LAST thing you want is to attempt to perpetuate it. You can hold on it by brute force for a while, but you'll lose your short-term gains in the long term.
Of course, very few companies really think long term. The tyranny of publically owned companies and their stock.
Poor guy, he has been the head and lead promoter of the Open Source group inside Nokia. He has convinced large parts of the upper management that Linux and Free Software are the way to go.. He's heavily invested not only millions and millions of Nokia's euros, but also most of his own credibility.
And now he's stuck with the GPLv3 and the whole lock-the-phone/DRM/etc business model becomes very hard to do. Now that major parts of the infrastructure (think glibc) are turning LGPLv3, he's stuck between a rock (freedom) and a hard place (loosing face/being stuck with Symbian)...
Carriers? You mean those companies who don't want to allow consumers the freedom of choice? The companies that want to prevent you from playing any music you have legally obtained from somewhere else (whether it was paid for, or given away for free) and want to force us to buy everything from them?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
In open source, its the community that dictates the terms. Not individuals.
Read radical news here
Here it is: the KDE Free Qt Foundation.
If Nokia screws up and stops releasing FOSS versions of Qt or otherwise messes with it, Qt's forcefully taken from them. The Foundation is there to ensure that Qt remains available. In a lot of ways, it would make more sense to do this now before Nokia starts using it as a hammer to pound DRM where it doesn't belong. Further, Nokia's competitors would be stupid to use it while Nokia controls it. Tools like Qt belong under an independent company or foundation. Jaaksi is just making that very clear.
What Jaaksi seems to be saying on behalf of his employer, Nokia, is that the company is unwilling to abide by the license (the GPL) under which their new business model is founded upon. That's not a way to appear clever. Though it's good of them to put the cards on the table so early after acquisition, it's still rather shameful of Nokia to try to bullshit us like that. Probably time to check the resume's of Nokia execs and dismiss any moles from Redmond.
I'm not planning on giving up on Qt anytime soon, but I do resent the increased level of alertness required by these probes.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Thank you Mr Jaaski, you made my day. I did not laugh so loud from corporate speech for long.
I really appreciate the : "We want to educate open-source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models."
Who educates who ? You simply did not grasp the inner meaning of Open Source. You seem confused the world does not work as you want it to be. Your solution is then to "Educate", to teach reality to all this dreamers because you know the true. It's so pathetic that it's funny. You do not understand your model is obsolete, people do not want DRM, they do not want SIM lock.
You present these "technologies" as natural, but they are not. Coalition of network operators, manufacturers, and content providers want to impose it to the users. It's nothing natural, it's just the easiest way to keep high margin business. Or so you think, because users will not keep buying this s**t if they have choice. And FLOSS gives this choice.
(as a contributor). Qt is GPL'd, and a fork is available at all times. Lots of good, GPL'd Qt software can only work with the fork if Nokia chooses to close it up. The loss are the good brains at Trolltech.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
"In this industry, we don't care about our customers. If you want to work with us, you'll have to respect that."
"Our business models are very fragile. Please don't break them."
"Our business is based on customer lock-in, rather than customer satisfaction. Don't interfere."
"We accept that we have problems, and that if we followed your rules we wouldn't have these problems. But instead, we want you to follow our rules and enjoy our problems with us."
Ok.
A common fear about BSD-style licenses is that people will make closed forks. If the project is active, this fear is very likely overblown.
Ok.
Some people think that Nokia wants to go play by itself.
He who controls the source, controls the industry.
In this case they don't control shit other than a phone. What an arrogant prick...and here I was actually thinking about getting a Nokia phone this year, silly me. Guess I can tell my friends and family they can cross Nokia off their lists since I won't help them with it.
"Just a fox, a whisper."
I don't see any evidence of linux being marginalized.
Well, for one, DRM doesn't work. There have been plenty of discussions about that on Slashdot. You cannot give out the lock and the key together and expect it to not get cracked. For a much more in-depth explanation, you can read this: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/96
"We like open source, as a way for us to get free cake, but please Linux devs, change your licenses and forget about all that freedom, transparency and competition stuff, let us have our free cake without having to risk our monopolies, this will allows us to be the only who profit from Linux, in exchange, I promise not to say you are not ready for business, thanks."
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Coming from someone that just bought a Nokia N810, that might sound biased, but... I think most posters here completely missed the point.
Nokia sells cellphones, and most of them are sold to carriers that want to use SIM locks and DRM to lock in customers to their plans and those stupid ringtones at $1.
Why do you think they use Linux almost only for "Internet Tablets"? No carriers would never sell a phone that's unlocked out of the box, and the vast majority of cellphones are bought with a plan, not unlocked.
Why do you guys think the iPhone is selling so well? Because it's unlocked? Because it's Open Source? And why do you guys think the iTunes music store grew so big at first? Because it was DRM free?
Nokia, RedHat, Sun are not making the rules. Business, cellphone carriers, and media companies are the ones lobbying governments, and until that changes there is no way Open Source software will grow unless we gradually change those rules.
..not to buy another Nokia product. I cannot fathom that someone would actually say these things in a public forum. He poses the question, "Why do we need closed vehicles?" yet doesn't answer. He pretty much says it's because the industry uses archaic business practices. I'm sorry, but that's not justification enough to try to get around the GPL.
Nokia is being forced by another industry (Verison, Sprunt, ATTingular, TMo, etc) to lock their cellphones and smartphones up so that the wireless giants can exhaustively control what end-customers can and can't do with them, or else Nokia devices will not be permitted on their networks and hence will be unsellable. Nokia must do this in order to survive since the Japanese, Korean, and most of all American (Motorolla) makers of the phone devices are already way to eager to do as the carriers demand. Nokia has already been completely pushed out of the CDMA phone market in the USA and the GSM market would just as soon tell them to FOAD too, unless they willing to cave in to the control-freak demands of the carriers.
Yeah, it pretty much does. Unless your DRM system is a full-blown AI (with all the knowledge of a competent lawyer (for your jurisdiction)), how is it going to judge whether the mashup video that you want to create, using someone's DRM-encumbered audio stream, is a copyright violation or fair use? Does it depend on whether you are going to view your mashup in your own home, or send it to friends? Does it matter if you intend a commercial use for your mashup? Even an IP lawyer can't necessarily tell you how a judge is going to rule on a license violation issue (or whether the license is valid, meaningful, unconcionable, etc)
With DRM, the answer to your request to access encumbered content can never be "maybe" or "sometimes"; it pretty much has to be "yes" or "no".
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
DRM saves me so much money by telling me exactly which products I am not going to buy. It's a great system.