

Nokia: Linux Developers need to be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry works. - gscott
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jun2008/gb20080612_288518.htm?chan=rss_topStories_ssi_5

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elad
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.

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pavelludiq
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.

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brandonkm
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.

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notauser
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.

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sunkencity
I'd say the S60 platform is hopelessly outdated.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 :)

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michaelbuckbee
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.

