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

Narrowsighted executives is nothing new.

[Anonymous Coward]

If those business people are happy to only compete on hardware, then yes.

If those business people also want to compete on software, OR, they don't read the license ("who reads the license?") and accidentally infringe, and therefore have to try to reach some agreement with a bunch of people who want nothing but to destroy them and see them humiliated, they might become less happy.

Nokia has decided to only compete on hardware, so no problem for them. Others who want to compete on software might disagree.

Re:Openess

[Interoperable]

Google is a great example of this. They have a good history of open-sourcing when it benefits them and closely guarding source when it doesn't. They manage to come across as a friendly, open organisation while maintaining a highly profitable business model.

A bad comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Huge majority of Google's profits come from Internet advertising, which has very little or nothing to do with Open Source. In fact, Google's whole business model largely depends on it closely guarding the search engine's algorithms.

Google has a lot of Open Source projects certainly and I'm not denying that but any such are - in the end - pretty much a sidetrack. "If we have a thousand nice, small projects some of them will hopefully eventually be profitable enough to justify the rest and perhaps even add a whole new sector to our income and others just manage to keep us in the headlines..." Then they opensource some of those projects and that's great.

But Open Source certainly has nothing at all to do with their core business (searching and advertising), quite the opposite.

Re:A bad comparison

[Chandon Seldon]

In fact, Google's whole business model largely depends on it closely guarding the search engine's algorithms.

Not really. What do you think would happen if they published their algorithms? Hint: Nothing. It's not 1999 where Google's results are drastically better than Webcrawler's or whatever. Everyone uses Google. Everyone would keep using Google if someone else popped up and said they had Google's algorithms and a much worse database of sites.

Hell, for all we know Cuil or Bing has the greatest algorithm ever. No one will ever know because they don't go there.