How Nokia Learned To Love Openness

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Once Sebastian Nyström laid out the logic of moving to open source, there was very little resistance within Nokia to doing so. I think that's significant; it means that, just as the GNU GPL has been tested in various courts and found valid, so has the logic behind open source — the openness that allows software to spread further, and improve quicker, for the mutual benefit of all. That idea is also increasingly accepted by hard-headed business people: it's become self-evident that it's a better way."

Comments

Apple contributes a ton to open source.

[SuperKendall]

Even they are not CONTRIBUTING to open source, more USING open source..

That is totally false.

They are a major contributor to webkit (the engine of Safari). They are a major contributor to GCC in the past, and now the LLVM project.

They also contribute back for all the other technologies you mentioned, and many more like launchd and now blocks/Grand Central.

Apple is one of the few companies to grasp the benefits of open source early, but the benefits are as much in contribution as they are in use - if you keep improvement's to yourself others cannot improve on them.

Re:Openess

[TemporalBeing]

I think you missed the point. Apple switched to BSD because it gained them something in a reasonable term.

OS9 was good, but it wasn't going to take them to the future. Fortunately for Apple, Steve Jobs created NeXT and built NextStep after they booted him from Apple. When they brought him back (circa 1996), they did so through buying NeXT. Jobs then threw ought the next version of MacOS that was in the works (big failure project for Apple), and took NeXTStep and renamed it Mac OSX.

It had nothing to do with convenience for Apple at the time other than they needed a new OS. But it was Job's foresight that brought it to the table.

Apple also went out of their way to ensure their license (AAPL) was Open Source Compliant, and have done a fine job working with the Open Source Community, including maintaining CUPS and several other projects.