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

Openess

[sopssa]

That idea is also increasingly accepted by hard-headed business people: it's become self-evident that it's a better way.

Of course this doesn't apply everywhere, but with things like Qt (cross-platform application and UI framework) it makes sense that everyone benefits from it. It's large things with thousands of users that do benefit from it, but if you're doing business with the the same product you cant really open it up and except still to get revenue - unless you go for the support route, but it also only works to certain types of products.

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.

Re:Openess

[DrgnDancer]

This. Open Source is self evidently a better way for certain areas of software development and certain companies. It doesn't necessarily follow that it is self evidently a better way in general. Open source libraries make sens in a lot of the same ways that open standards make sense. They're, in fact, the next obvious growth of open standards. If we can all agree on the inputs and the outputs of the blackbox, why don't we all just use the same transparent box instead?

Open source also makes a lot of sense when you look at "reinventing the wheel" type problems. I need an Operating System for my device. I don't really care about making money on the operating system, I want to make money on the device. Hey, look, here's this Open Source operating system that works on lots of devices, can be easily modified to work on my device, and saves me a ton of work. Open source makes sense. I can save a lot of work reinventing the wheel on a non-monetized product by using something someone else has already done and opened for me.

Open source makes less sense when your software is your product. Microsoft is understandably reluctant to release their source code. It is not self evident that Microsoft would benefit from opening up its products. In fact, most would agrue that the opposite is self evident.

Apple looked at the same problem that Nokia is looking at and decided that since they had an operating system in house already, it made more sense to just modify it then modifying someone else's open operating system. It's worked for them and it is not self evident that making a different choice would have worked out better.

It is self evident that using Open Source is superior in certain situations and under certain circumstances. It is self evident that NOT using Open Source is superior in certain situations and under circumstances. It is NOT self evident that using Open Source is inherently superior. At least not to me.

Re:Openess

[GMFTatsujin]

Great points. Here's my two cents.

I bought a N800 because it was the right hardware for what I wanted to do. I needed something I could write on, something I could instant message on occasionally, and something that was light enough and small enough to have on me all the time. Some phones are good for messaging, some notebooks are good for writing, but the N800 brought it together for me.

Having Maemo, the open source OS, come specially developed for the N800 was a super plus because it offered me a lot more flexibility. True, a lot of what's out there is the standard issue FOSS apps -- but that's the point. I've run SSH sessions from my N800 to diagnose headless server issues, for crying out loud.

The rest of the time, I write on it, do some twitter, and keep it comfortably out of the way but close at hand. It's a brilliant device, Nokia made some great hardware choices, but they're not in the software biz. FOSS only helps make it better, and was a solid development choice.

Re:Openess

[replicant108]

Apple looked at the same problem that Nokia is looking at and decided that since they had an operating system in house already, it made more sense to just modify it then modifying someone else's open operating system.

Except that Apple's operating system is based on modifying 'someone else's open operating system'.

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.

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:Narrowsighted executives is nothing new.

[jedidiah]

If you take other people's work and build on it and call the end result your own without
bothering to consider the terms involved then you quite rightly deserve to be humiliated.

It's no more than what you would get for acting like a toddler in any other context.

In this case

[kdawgud]

Well, in this case it may have made sense for Nokia. They are a hardware company, so giving away the software for free would not directly harm their income. Other industries won't be convinced so easily (i.e. companies that make money off of selling software to the masses).

Re:"Openness" is a strategy for failure

[kurt555gs]

M$ office vs OpenOffice.org
Parallels vs VirtualBox

(Yes I used the epithet "M$"), now watch my theory that the "M$" folks have automated bots or paid shills to mod down any post containing said derogatory term.

Re:"Openness" is a strategy for failure

[Nadaka]

I'm not so sure that Visual Studio is better than the open source alternatives. Eclipse is quite good, and the latest versions of Visual Studio have hidden their keyboard shortcuts, making learning efficient use of the system more difficult.

Playing to Apple's weakness

[tick-tock-atona]

Nokia's "open" strategy will pay off big time in the long run. At the moment, their major threat is the iPhone, which inherits all of apple's strengths (RDF, UI design) as well as it's weaknesses (software/hardware lockdown).

The next-gen Nokia phone on the other hand (successor to the N900) will get all the hardware features of the iPhone, but with the openness of a linux software stack. Want to make an app that downloads podcasts? Fine! Want to use your phone as a modem? No problem! In fact, no corporation enforcing their moral or business rules on how you use your phone, or alienation of talented developers!

Maemo and Qt being open source will ensure that the software features of the Maemo platform quickly eclipse those of the artificially limited iPhone platform. Maemo's based on Debian - so Nokia automatically gets just about every open-source software package in existence available on their platform.

I think this is the most serious threat that the turtleneck sweater brigade have yet seen.

Re:Now they get it.

[the ReviveR]

Too little, too late. Now with Android showing the way, they realize how closed development put them behind. I enjoyed my Nokia phones, but I got frustrated with the lack of development.

Too little? Too late?

You mean full linux platform where you can simply type "sudo gainroot" to get root access?
Platform to which it will be almost trivial to port a huge library of current linux apps?

Personally I really don't like Androids "open". The under the hood it's a closed platform that gives you a Java interface that you can use for most things. No easy porting, not even full Java libraries and carriers can prevent tethering etc. While Android is "open", it's not the same thing as real linux platform in your pocket. Maemo in my mind is something completely different. Something the other manufacturers will have to start catching up.

Nokias hardware has always been great quality, the software has just been dragging behind because Symbian platform just plain sucks. Buying QT and going linux seems like a real killer move to me. Now they just need to dump Symbian and really start spending time and money on Maemo. Hopefully rest of the linux community will gain something from Nokias enormous resources too.

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:Now they get it.

[EvilNTUser]

Maemo version 1 was released in 2005 on the Nokia 770. Before Android, before the iPhone. Just because Nokia's roadmap was a bit longer doesn't mean they weren't showing the way.

In six months we'll have all our lightweight desktop apps running on our phones and people will finally realize just how far ahead of everyone else Nokia really is.

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.

Re:"Openness" is a strategy for failure

[Schmorgluck]

UI apart, of course. The usability area is something that definitively the community should focus more.

UI is one thing, but I think the main usability issue of the overwhelming majority of open source projects is the user documentation. Even though nowadays software engineers are often taught about documentation, and even though the community has broadened enough to have some skilled redactors that could contribute that way (if the devs did give a shit), many projects have no documentation worth mentioning.

And I think it's a more important concern than the UI, in most case. New users can be a bit confused by an UI that isn't like what they are used to, it won't be a big concern (at least not for long) if the application, and its UI, is properly documented