June 24, 2008

Don’t Know if I Would Go That Far

The Inquirer has a dilly of a piece on the move by Nokia to take the Symbian handheld OS Open Source. Link here. As the lede intones, I think there are a few hurdles. –

Mindset. Did Google lose or did Nokia? To my mind what this telegraphs to me is that Nokia realized that in the battle between the Cathedral and the Bazaar they blinked and decided to open up the OS. Hint: FOSS wins when there is more FOSS not less.

Did Nokia really go Open Source? I notice that they are using the Eclipse Public License NOT GPL 2/3. Why is that important? Well in a prior review I noticed some most unusual verbage –

Commercial distributors of software may accept certain responsibilities with respect to end users, business partners and the like. While this license is intended to facilitate the commercial use of the Program, the Contributor who includes the Program in a commercial product offering should do so in a manner which does not create potential liability for other Contributors.

I can appreciate the attempt, but it pretty much would be impossible to guarantee that inclusion of commerical components will not conflict with the open provisions of the EPL. That’s why the GPL just says ‘Nyet’ and avoids the whole issue.

The code is available to the members of the Foundation according to the Inquirer. And who might the gatekeepers be that say whether you can join the Foundation? Well Nokia and their ilk I guess. No such problems exist for GPL code - Go to SourceForge and download it.

Is this a good move? Well if the Foundation is open to all AND they move eventually to a GPL based licensing I would say yes. Is it a Android killer? Time will tell. Android has not hit the market yet in a physical manifestation. Till we see a head to head comparison in the marketplace all bets are off. But I would offer the following — if Android is even close to Symbian in capability, the advantage is to Google. They have a nest of free development providers and Google Widgets to support warp speed deployment cycles.

But there is one thing I agree with in the Inquirer article — MicroSoft’s Mobile Phone platform is in trouble. No developer is going to pay when they can use a competing tool for free.

Filed under 3g, 4g, Google, Open Source, Wireless, new technology by Dr. Dog