Nokia: Linux Needs to Learn Business
[Quote:]
Speaking at the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, Dr Ari Jaaksi told delegates that the open-source community needed to be ‘educated’ in the way the mobile industry currently works, because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.
Jaaksi, Nokia’s vice president of software and head of the Finnish handset manufacturer’s open-source operations, said: “We want to educate open-source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models.”
Jaaksi admitted that concepts like these “go against the open-source philosophy”, but said they were necessary components of the current mobile industry. “Why do we need closed vehicles? We do,” he said. “Some of these things harm the industry but they’re here [as things stand]. These are touchy, emotional issues but this dialogue is very much needed. As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too.”
So your answer to the question “Why do we need closed vehicles?” is “We do”? And you want to use Open Source but you’re not ready to follow the rules Open Source asks you to follow? You want to ditch the core what makes Open Source work and have us work for you in a way that allows you to use vendor lock-in to garantuee profits?
Excuse me for not being convinced by that brilliant dissertation. You’ll find that a lot of Open Source developers would rather think you just declared war on them.