Being open

Just slightly off topic... well, not really, only adding an additional aspect:

I work for a public company with roughly 12000 employees and the biggest market share in my country. In terms of public perception, it's on the same level as Nokia here (the difference is that we are on the national market only, while Nokia operates worldwide).

Some time ago, our management decided to join the blogging scene and started to do corporate blogs very much the way Ari does except that comments were always filtered to avoid any kind of negative reaction.
About 6 months after they started it, one of the posts in our CEO's blog stirred a mild debate in the media about the way our company would handle a certain problem in the future. It was far from what we have here, no bad feelings, just a little irritation. (And, to be honest, it was probably the first time anyone noticed he ran a blog at all.)

The consequence was that a few days later they closed the blog, deleted all entries and re-directed the page to our corporate homepage. It never existed.
We discussed this decision inhouse a lot (afterwards, of course). Most of us said it was a shame. The explanation was: As a profit oriented company, we simply cannot risk having any other channel of communication than the official one. Whatever any of our representatives writes has to be checked and double-checked until in line with our official marketing campaigns (=read: until there's no more content at all).

Why do I tell you this? Because whenever we discuss this "is Nokia really serious about being open"-thing (and it's not the first time we do), I notice how open Ari's communication is. Comments remain where they are (did anyone else find the "you're an aHole"-comment extremely embarrassing? I'm ashamed that this is the image 'my' community paints of itself), he keeps on explaining and explaining to people who probably can't even afford an N-series product... Remember the end-of-770-fiasco, he was in a similar situation back then, back against the wall. But instead of hiding behind marketing phrases, he continues talking on an eye-to-eye level to his readers. This is one aspect of openness. Openness in communications. As long as we have this openness, I'm fairly confident that we can simply trust his team that at least they try to do The Right Thing™.

you're being cruel to the kids.

but you're so right. - you know what? i'm finding myself on the wrong side here. i do not use the binary driver, i boycott skype and use SIP instead, use jabber instead of MSN, i don't play MP3 and i block flash. i firmly believe in free software as a political issue as opposed to so-called "open source" as a marketing buzzword. still, i don't see one single negative aspect in what ari said and what nokia does. all i can see is free software projects that benefit a lot from nokia's involvement. and i can't see what's wrong with that.

I wonder if nokia is trying to actually make the IT a phone now and running up against a wall trying to get US carriers to offer it, hence the statements at minimum about SIM locking. I don't think any phone in the US will take off that's not offered by a carrier, and the change in iPhone pricing suggests that subsidizing the initial cost of the phone is most effective (which presumably requires locking the phone.) And regarding DRM - I can't see how anyone likes that but at the moment it seems like content providers will only sell streaming content without DRM.

In my mind it's a shame how the original article was framed - you first need to very firmly establish the benefits of DRM for linux *users* under today's climate and what that allows to happen, and why that can't happen without DRM right now, before you even start to talk about developers.

Developers working for free will decide for themselves if they want to be involved with DRM. My guess is most probably won't, and almost certainly the "open source community" won't.

The original talk makes a lot of sense within the context of OS developers working on someone else's dime. Perhaps that should have been emphasized.

or it could be that they are forshadowing a move from symbian to qtopia on their phones, with all the issues that may come from that...

and if they can enable developers to run the same apps on the phones and the tablets...

Well, it's exactly because I suffered the pain of the binary nvidia crap (in a distant past, when I wrongly thought they supported linux) that I don't want any piece of hardware that only works with a binary only driver (like the wifi chip in my tablet).
You are right though: fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. There won't be a third time.

Ok, my turn now :-P

I wonder why people here got so excited and drooled forever over a leaked Diablo without noticing that it was running an out-of date kernel (yes, exactly, it's mostly the same stuff you got when you bought your n810) and without complaining that a lot of the kernel code is public (we make the tarball available) but not merged.

Now with OMAP3 you can just search the omap ml archives and check how many new contributions are flocking from either Nokia or people sponsored by Nokia.

But what catches on is instead the intentional misinterpretation of a message that probably could have been expressed better.

I'm disappointed, I would have expected some more intelligent reaction.

This is a very good point. See here and here. Any help is appreciated.

fwiw I wasn't mentioning you either but the generic "you", anyone.

I really enjoy being a mere dumb user who does not have to worry about all this stuff.

I realize that the Internet Tablet world will be vastly different in 3-5 years than it is now, and try not to get all worked up over how it is going to get there.

Right now, I have a great device (2 of them in fact) that does all I want it to do and am enjoying the flood of new functionality that continuously is released to this community.

Nokia is a smart company that understands the equation of the marketplace---if you fail to market devices that the users will love, then you will not sell enough of those devices. I trust that Nokia will operate in their best interests, which will result in devices that I will want to own.

My statement stands. In this case the answer really was a simple and obvious YES, as you indicate in your second paragraph.

Just because the overarching issue is complex doesn't mean you can't boil the essence of it down to yes/no paths.

His statements indicate no such thing. Again, that's just an extreme kneejerk, paranoid interpretation (EDIT: that's a general assessment).

What colour is the sky? Yes or no. ;]

Hey ... just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean no one is out to get you. :]

Its unfortunate that you generally dismiss such negative feedback as extreme, kneejerk, paranoid, religious zealotry rather than viewing it through the same sympathetic lens you ask of others.

In any case, I think that Nokia has clarified its position a lot since Ari's easily misinterpreted statements. I hope that this latest tempest in a blogosphere hasn't discouraged Nokia representatives from keeping an open, uncensored channel to the rest of the community. It is pretty easy for people on both sides of a debate to hide behind the relative anonymity of the Internet and say nasty things about each other. It all has to be taken with a huge grain of salt though and in the end, these things are said because people actually care about the tablet and its future. It is a lot better than being ignored (and Nokia will likely get more sales as a result of all this free publicity ... the truly paranoid might think this was all a big marketing scheme ;])