And now, something a bit more theoretical -- or is it?

I'm taking several weeks off. Up here in the north, summer time is so valuable that I want to dedicate as much time as possible to my family and to myself.

So I've been sailing with my family and doing other relaxing stuff. (Lasse, thanks!)

You may know that up here in Scandinavia we have something we call "every man's rights". In essence, I can hike on any land, spend a night in any forest, or moor my boat to any island I please -- as long as I'm not in a close proximity of anybody's home or summer cottage. Open access to our beautiful country!

10 pm!

You need proper tools for docking in the wild!


So I'm getting ready for the fall. One important occasion will be the Maemo Summit right after the OSiM world in Berlin. I hope we can -- once again -- initiate some fruitful discussion around open source (I know we will ;-) ), do some real work, meet interesting people and have fun. See you there!

Symbian Foundation

As you may have noticed, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP to create a new open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone we plan to establish the Symbian Foundation as a means to support everybody who wants to use, and/or enhance this platform. Contributions from Foundation members will be integrated to further enhance the platform. Membership of this non-profit Foundation will be open to all organizations.

Bruce had a good comment to this discussion. He call it a bright line system. He says: " The key is knowing how to draw bright lines between different parts of the system. That's a legal term, and in this case it means a line between the Free Software and the rest of the system, that is "bright" in that the two pieces are very well separated, and there is no dispute that one could be a derivative work of the other, or infringes on the other in any way. All of the Free Software goes on one side of that line, and all of the lock-down stuff on the other side."

This exactly the same thing I discussed in my article on our experiences and learning on building consumer products with open source. Section 5.2: "As some components are available only as closed source components, we need to mix open source and proprietary code. This mixing calls for proper architecture management to manage different licensing rules within the product code."

We understood this, of course, from the day one. And it is still the way to do it. Others, like Ubuntu, follows the same rule very well indeed.

...related to the article found here.

The journalist emphasized things his way -- things that he saw important. Fair enough. My points are:

Companies like Nokia need to learn the open source way of working. This means not only fulfilling the letter of GPL, LGPL etc. but also the spirit. In my mind this means integrating the corporate work with the open source community, participating, contributing back the code, building the code in open projects and not only releasing it when mandatory, not forking, etc. Open source is a very effective way to create software together with others; together with other individuals and other companies. This is something that the corporate must learn to really benefit from open source.

The open source community should also be willing to learn. I think it would benefit everybody if people developing open source code would understand WHY certain things are made the way they are. Maybe there are other reasons than stupidity and an evil mind? Trying to understand and learn would benefit both open source projects and corporate to come up with better solutions. As an example, a subsidized business model has it challenges in the context of truly open devices. Understanding why, what to do about it, etc, would benefit us all.

Then, somebody told me that the open source community do not need to listen or learn from the corporate. They do not work for you, somebody said. But actually, many of them do. Let me explain:

The most relevant open source projects have an increasing number of corporate developers. Companies like Nokia, Red Hat, Novel, IBM, Opened Hand, Imendio, Trolltech, HP, and so forth develop code in projects such as Linux, GStreamer, Mozilla, KDE, GNOME etc .. For these companies, open source is not a hobby but serious business. It is a way to get software developed in an open collaborative manner -- to meet their business goals. So if a company pays (as a salary, as a contract to a hacker company or some other way) for the development, then I claim that the developer works for the company. Even if the development happens in an open source project.

We participate in open source projects with individuals, but also with companies like listed above. I think it benefits everybody to understand the constraints, motivations, and limitations each individual, corporate or project may have.

I'm not a teacher, I'm a learner.

I just arrived in Berlin to participate the Handsets World conference. (The Netherlands just scored a goal, by the way!)


I'll have a keynote talk tomorrow, and a panel session. My talk is going to be about our vision -- and how open source can help.






And now it is 2-0!

Thanks for the feedback to my previous post!! I merely described the current situation.

But things are changing. We see many new kinds of devices appearing: Internet Tablets, small PCs, multimedia computers, and so forth. For all these new interesting devices, open source is the way to go. Seriously, what else? A closed sw stack? I do not see any other way to develop these new interesting devices –bundled with interesting services – but to use open source more and more. That is simply the way to build these devices. It is the only approach flexible and powerful enough.

In the traditional phone business, things may be a bit more difficult. Traditional phones have already good operating systems and software optimized for their reasonably narrow set of use cases and for fixed business ecosystems. So, it’ll be more difficult to change that landscape to more open direction. I thought the same was the case with the PC – but Ubuntu may be proving me wrong. So you never know about the traditional phones either. The sure thing, though, is that for all new interesting highly connected devices, Linux and open source is the way to go. This is my opinion.

Then, what can we do to speed this all up? We work very hard on the next highly connected products – to bring new stuff to maemo and develop it further. And I also want to invite you all to do it with us.

So, please, take a look at this. For the next 10 days, we are opening a brainstorm period for the future of maemo.org. The goal is to consolidate feedback from the developers and users in the community, and integrate that feedback into the mid-term agenda of the project.

The work we do with maemo is our practical implementation towards more open environments for mobile devices. In our case, the Tablets provide a challenging new device category that will evolve over time. And open source and community participation are the only means for us to succeed.

We hire people and open new initiatives to get there.

P.S.
Linux phone shipments declining. Why
1) one reason descibed above
2) another reason
3) a third reason

We’ve been busy lately! Next software releases and products, architecture works with the Trolls, browser work with Mozilla, and so forth. It’s already almost June and I’m thinking we just got over Xmas. It’s good to realize that in about 4 weeks, nights start to get longer and days shorter here in the Northern hemisphere. The Earth rotates towards the next winter! Get ready!

Linux phone shipments declining – cool user experience from closed camps

We all like open source. Free speech, good beer, bugs are shallow, community will fix everything (if you let ‘em), no patents to slow us down, decisions based on technical merits, etc. If you hear all this positive talk you may wonder why won’t this good software just crawl into devices and turn them on. How come the shipment of Linux phones is declining globally? How come some of the bravest open source device and phone activities do not seem to get very far? And why do the most interesting user experiences and new user interfaces seem to come from proprietary camps? Apples, Microsofts, LGs, Samsungs, Nokias – they all introduce cool new devices, software and user interfaces based on closed software stacks. Why is this? The answer is NOT that because the companies are evil. There must be a better answer. Maybe I’ll explain them in my next post ;-)

Ubuntu rules

So what’s with computers then? Ubuntu is surprising me. I’ve been thinking that the traditional PC desktop environment is always going to be dominated by the closed players – where the one has 90% and the other has 10% and that's it. I also thought that the computer concept needs to radically change before anybody can seriously challenge the status quo. Network PC, mobile devices, something else. But now then, what’s with Ubuntu?

I do not know about their exact market share or Mark’s goals with Ubuntu. But the team is making a great progress. I’ve always liked Ubuntu but was kinda ashamed of using it. It’s brown, it doesn’t have an apple on it, and it doesn’t come with Internet Messenger. But this week two little things happened.

First, I bought a new smart card reader. I connected it with the laptop (!) running Ubuntu, pushed in an SD card – and it just worked! Ubuntu – laptop – smart card reader. Plug-n-play. This is seriously important to my father! He’s 78.

Then, our Windows XP laptop lost its network settings. I said to my daughter, I’ll fix it. Meanwhile, why don’t you use my laptop. I got the Windows laptop fixed the next day and gave it back to my daughter. She had used my Ubuntu laptop for a day for all she does. I did not get any comments nor any complaints or “how can I do this and that” questions. She was just happy using it. She is eleven now.

I find this pretty amazing!

This is a bit old news. We announced the WIMAX version on the N810 in CTIA already 2 weeks ago. And we received a CTIA WIRELESS 2008® E-TECH AWARD for the best Fashion & Lifestyle Product.

Wow, I feel pretty fashionable now!

We are also making progress with some longer term plans and thoughts. We plan to make the maemo platform even more powerful and extend its capabilities further. In addition to GTK+, we intend to provide a Qt-based application development environment to the maemo platform. We will therefore hire people with knowledge of GTK+/C and/or Qt/C++.

I’ll keep you posted. Take a look at the Nokia jobs and the maemo.org, too.

OSIM USA 2008

I arrived at San Francisco on Monday to attend the OSiM USA 2008. The first day was very interesting. I met partners and colleagues. I found many talks, such as the Access keynote by Kamada-san, and Bill Weinberg’s on communities very interesting.