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allnameswereout's Avatar
Posts: 3,397 | Thanked: 1,212 times | Joined on Jul 2008 @ Netherlands
#48
I first heard about Maemo, Hildon and Nokia 770 on http://www.gnomedesktop.org many years ago (2005) because I am a GNOME user. Sharp was doing it the wrong way (although I was still into it), smartphones were uncommon, and there was a market for this kind of device.

Also remember it is important to keep in mind the differences between open source, open standard and defacto standard. Sometimes a project can have 1 or more of these characteristics, and some of these definitions can apply on hardware.

Originally Posted by qgil View Post
Open source is about software but most of the criticism towards lack of openness to Nokia in e.g. the thread linked above goes around hardware aka products. Nokia doesn't aim to translate the open source principles to product planning and marketing.
Analysis of source code by fanoush stirred up some interesting bits though. This got catched up by some news sites and the ball got rolling. Free publicity!

The problem is rather the communities behind the competing projects you mentioned. They were/are strong. Journalists follow the project. I even see on news sites news about Nokia (and even N97) about which I feel like 'thats only reported because Nokia is market leader'. Same for Microsoft. I tried same with Maemo, but journalists showed little to no interest.

With competitors however...

1) Apple's iPhone. They just use the jailbreaking community as their inspirition for features and quietly catch up with features long present in other devices yet market it as if its something huge. Add to that the rumour community and such. Yet, this jealbreaking community is partly based on open source and quite huge. Apple survives these rumours and such also because of the zealots in the Apple journalist community. Nokia doesn't have these zealots but there is another project which does have them...

2) OpenPandora. What a momentum they had. You call it a failure. OTOH look at the big and active community they've build on a product which has not shipped at all? They keep their community alive with rumours and updates. They interact with the community. Even if they slip some of those announcements it does keep the community alive. OTOH, because they don't have a name to defend yet they don't have to worry about their reputation.

Both of these examples contain a paradox. Sometimes neutral or negative publicity is better than none at all. Sometimes vague details are better than clear details or no details at all.

OpenMoko is a different story. When OpenMoko started LiMo was small, iPhone was non-existant, Android was non-existant and the smartphone market was still maturing. They did too little, too late. Had they invested more resources on their project and delivered on time a product we'd all be running OpenMoko now. Something similar is true for OLPC. When OLPC started there was no netbook market whatsoever. Now, netbooks are the defacto standard laptop-like computer devices for people in Western societies because they're relatively cheap, portable, and do the simple things people want to do on a computer while in contrast the profitable 3rd world hasn't emerged.

And this is one of the reasons why Maemo is quite open (at least compared to direct competitors) when it comes to disclose and discuss about platform details relevant to developers, but less about end user features and even less about unannounced device products.
Without supporting or analysing the projects and products you mentioned your statement is not valuable nor well argumented.

Its more fair to state the reasoning is part of Nokia's corporate culture to behave like this.

Your example of Nokia N97 counteracts this though but people really want some of the positive aspects of the iPhone in a Nokia product.

We're all Maemo users here, and we run the OS on devices made by Nokia. Not on other devices. So we depend on Nokia's (future) hardware.

Meanwhile I see Nokia experimenting with projects like NFC and those information tags. Because such depends on acceptance of the technology you cannot heavily invest in such, but because also proven technologies (and standards) like 3G and camera are added those are on the safe side of acceptance. Users and developers just want to know what is not on the safe side of acceptance. Because such is not clear, having patience to learn about it isn't easy.

Originally Posted by qole View Post
Even that is overly optimistic; everything has to be re-written for the unique environment of Android.
Applications must also be rewritten and/or optimized for Maemo.

If your toolkit and UI are well defined and optimized and you support open standards or defacto standards (such as for example PNG, TCP/IP) you can integrate features in the OS using OO (and libraries). So, for example, you already have a libc and a libpng, but you don't have a UI framework (Hildon, Qt, Cocoa, ...). If you have a good IDE which does the dirty for you in this regard the rest is peanuts.

Simply porting desktop applications to ARM is not the same. In fact, with 24/7 connectivity you can easily run those desktop applications remotely. End of story. Bad performance of a web browser is not the same. Core feature. A web browser not supporting Flash or Java is not the same. Defacto standard. You really must take into account the + and - sides of the hardware to take full use of it, to exploit its + while negating its - (for example convince Youtube to provide alternative for Flash videos).

Maemo's standardness is its main strength, the thing that sets the Maemo devices apart from all the rest. That's a standard Linux kernel under the hood, and everything is built on standard, open-source toolkits, so it is relatively painless to port stuff... Unlike the competition, which requires a complete development from scratch approach.
Maemo defined (open) standards and worked together with FD.o integrating them. As a counter example it is a Linux kernel with an old wireless stack which new applications cannot use.
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