Nokia: Linux Developers need to be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry works. | Hacker News Reader

Nokia: Linux Developers need to be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry works.

businessweek.com

11 pointsgscott6 comments

Hopefully Android is just the beginning and soon enough the mobile industry will find that it needs to be educated in the way open source works.

Good thing about "current industry practice" is that it changes. I hope Nokia understands that DRM and stuff like that is not going to win, and start thinking about the time when they will have to be reeducated in the way the mobile industry works.

I think the spokesman for Nokia is spot on. Nokia is a key component behind the symbian os, which is the most widely used os on phones and is open source as well. Right now Android is really just a concept that has had no commercial implementation. I really don't think Android will surpass symbian or s60 ever. Nokia is the only company in this game who just makes phones, this is what they do best, so they are in a unique position. People arn't going to use Android on their phones just because it's made by Google. Only a small amount of people even know about Android and its non-existant in handsets out on the market now. Symbian and S60 however are widespread with presence worldwide in a wide variety of handsets.

Symbian is closed source (and, as you say very popular and very good).

The open source Nokia is looking to adopt is Linux, already seen on the N810. Nokia seems to be making the move to cut development costs.

Nokia also doesn't just sell phones, they also sell network infrastructure and service and software outside of the telecomms industry.

Quite why they think that the OSS world will help them with DRM is beyond me. It seems highly optimistic at best. But since it is open source they can really do what they want provided they are willing to comply with the license and pay their own developers. There is not much stopping companies erecting DRM on top of Linux (and other GPLv2 code) - see TiVo and the motivation for moving to GPL v3 for an example.

I'd say the S60 platform is hopelessly outdated. The phones look the same and are almost functionally the same as they were 4 years ago, just a little bit faster. Why is there no decent browser on any other phone than the iPhone? I think that these new OSes on mobile that are unix based will totally change the mobile phone world because they are enginneered to be computers rather than direct descendants from voice handset.

A friend had hanged out with some Ericsson developers he knows and they were laughing at the iphone design. "It hasn't got any high performance mobile chips", "They're designing this phone totally wrong"... Yeah, it's because the phone is no longer a phone, it's a computer. (Hopefully a computer one can install a free OS on and liberate :)

The spokesman is correct that DRM and intellectual property controls are needed for how the industry is structured now.

THAT IS THE PROBLEM. How the industry is structured now sucks and is completely backwards. Have they not seen the tremendous growth of the Internet (an open ecosystem for development) over the last decade? Have they not seen the massive goodwill, economic benefit and creative outflows that have been happening.

Someone needs to drag these guys kicking and screaming over to the money tree and shut them up.

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