Nokia and Open Source — a Trial By Fire

An anonymous reader writes "The H has a damning piece on Nokia's open source smart phone projects, Maemo and MeeGo, and why they failed. 'They did dumb stuff like re-writing the whole networking stack, duplicating as they went. So instead of re-using NetworkManager and improving it, and getting to market fast – they re-wrote, got something that still doesn't work well, failed to push Linux forward, and failed. Repeat that for every technology pick and you get the idea,' said Andrew Wafaa. 'The N900 was a great product. Immediately [after] it was launched it was announced that it was a dead product, ISV-wise. They announced a Qt re-write/project re-set. Then they merged Maemo into MeeGo, giving another project re-set. Then, when they were coming up to release in September 2010, there was another project reset to switch to a different Qt technology (even the Qt groups in-fight in Nokia). In consequence they have no shipping product.' At the same time, 'both Nokia and Intel were working on separate handset UIs using Qt, the former proprietary, the latter open-source. A better worked example of squandering your leadership role and wrestling yourself to the ground is hard to see. Nokia deserve their trial by fire – and I hope the people who truly screwed up the amazing Linux opportunity that was the N900 get shut down in the process.'"

Comments

Re:lol nokia

[Mr_Silver]

They are great at designing, building and marketing dumbphones. Smartphones, however, they they are certainly heading towards rank incompetence at a rapid pace, especially given how badly they've handled the ownership of Symbian, Meamo and MeeGo.

They aren't doing dumbphones very well any more either. For example, the Nokia 6600 fold has a bug where if you press the "6mno" key three times in a row during texting then every so often the phone will lock up solid. The only way to get back a working phone is to pop out the battery.

Since the issue was found (and reported on Nokia's forums) they've released no less than 6 updates - none of which have resolved the problem.

Re:Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smar

[gbjbaanb]

have they moved to Android then? 'cos you cannot mean Microsoft - the company famous for infighting between teams. The Kin was shut down because it was in competition with Windows Phone team, and really - if you want a good laugh, read this blog piece about putting the shutdown menu into Vista.

Now, when you consider that one of the options available to Nokia in taking Windows Phone 7 was that their teams get to work on the WP7 code and customise or improve it you begin to understand just what a total, epic, unmitigated, colossal fail WP7 is soon to be (not that its been a roaring success so far!)