What's Up With Nokia?

by Mike Gunderloy - Jun. 13, 2008Comments (0)

Some comments made by a Nokia VP at the Handsets World conference have the open source community in a bit of a flap. According to Business Week, Nokia's Dr. Ari Jaaksi told the audience "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."

Understandably, some open-source developers don't feel any particular need to be "educated." While most of us are happy to respect intellectual property rights (the GPL, after all, is firmly rooted in copyright), DRM and SIM locks are certainly less popular. Projects that attempt to lock developers into a closed platform with arbitrary-seeming limits are not likely to gain much community traction.

And yet, it's probably not wise to read too much into one conference talk that might just have been a trial balloon. Nokia, after all, does support a fair number of open source projects. They're also behind the Maemo platform for Internet tablet, and their acquisition of Trolltech makes them the default guardians of the Qt cross-platform application framework.

Other comments from Dr. Jaaksi make it clear that he at least understands something about working with the open source community. For example, he points out that Nokia has learned that it's better to work with an existing community than to take code internal and then release a fork that potentially no one else will contribute to.

So, let's not get the torches and pitchforks together too quickly. While the comments on DRM and SIM locks are certainly distasteful, and we don't yet know what the company's plans are for Trolltech, Nokia's actions to date show that it is┬а at least trying to be a good corporate open source citizen. Our role as advocates should be to encourage them in the right direction, rather than to condemn hastily.