Collaboration, upstream, Intel, and others

We are living interesting times. The current economical situation has made things change faster. The whole mobile world is changing. New players are entering and old players are changing or disappearing.

There is now less time and energy for games, politics and religion in the tech world. For all of us who are in this for the long run -- we all need to get products and services out to consumers ASAP. For us, the key is collaboration.

As a part of our strategy in Maemo, we collaborate with many partners. We work closely with the Mozilla foundation and the Linux foundation. We work in several open source projects such as Gnome, Qt, X and so forth. In addition we work with several industry partners, such as Texas Instruments, who provide us with the underlying technology for the existing Maemo products.

And today we announced that we collaborate with Intel inside several new and established open source projects. This is the kind of upstream collaboration we've been talking about. We say: "Intel and Nokia are coordinating their Open Source technology selection and development investments for Maemo and Moblin. This means alignment behind a range of key Open Source technologies for Mobile Computing such as: oFono, ConnMan, Mozilla, X.Org, BlueZ, D-BUS, Tracker, GStreamer, PulseAudio. "

We both feel that it makes a lot of sense to collaborate and direct key investments to the same direction. It allows us both to contribute mature technology to same open source projects – and not fragment the industry.

All this is needed to create new interesting products and services.

Spam on Qt, Maemo and Moblin

It's been a while.

One guy just told me he's reading my blog. I guess I better start writing ...

Let me spam this time with two topics only:

Look at Qt opened up. Pretty cool. You can see the work in progress.

Look at Maemo and Moblin work. oFono.org is a place to design an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications.

Qt goes LGPL

Qt will be available under LGPL and repositories will be publicly available. We invite contributions ... so the development process will open up too.

This will make Qt a very interesting platform. It is now truly open, cross platform, and technically very advanced.

Many people had already earlier an opinion that Qt is technically very advanced, flexible and powerful. It was only the licensing and the development model that was wrong. Now, that’s fixed.

Open and Agile -- the Transparent Twins

Component level

Open source adds transparency. It provides a very practical means to access and share code, work together with others, and design and implement software in a collaborative manner. When code is licensed under a copyleft license, there is also a guarantee that nobody can mess it up! Transparency and free access to source code provide very powerful tools for software development.

Commercial system level

However, building complex systems remains challenging. Developers who never worked in a large commercial project easily underestimate challenges outside the source code domain. Creating right user experience is hard. Collecting feedback from users during the development is not simple. Providing accurate project estimations for various stakeholders remains tough. Integrating complex systems from components that originate from different sources is much more difficult than writing the actual components. Testing and stabilizing large systems gets harder and harder as systems grow. Replanning after late and big changes in project conditions is laborious. And, running several software projects concurrently multiplies all the above challenges.


Open and Agile

Open source adds transparency to software development. The code, developers, and design decisions are all visible to everybody. I believe transparency can also be used in other areas of software projects. Agile methods, such as Scrum, can provide such transparency on the system project level.

Our context is challenging, though. Teams cannot be co-located. Non-agile hardware development happens simultaneously with software development. There are tens -- and even hundreads -- of Scrum teams working for a same project. Projects deal with issues ranging from hardware design, driver and OS base port, middleware and application adaptation -- all the way to end user experience and over 40 language variants ... and so forth. In these circumstances a basic idea of a a few agile software teams is hardly a complete solution.

I believe

It is a bit early for me to make any final conclusions of agile methods in practice. But I'm a believer, and we are using Scrum now more and more at Nokia. I believe that what open source has done for software development, agile methonds can do for commercial system and product development. Add visibility, access, and intellectual honesty. Transparency. You cannot hide shit no more.

A few thoughs based on your feedback

Some time ago I asked you comments about openness. You sent me some interesting links. Thanks! I try to summarize your comments a bit.

Rights vs. executing the rights

Joel explained the idea of community openness by using three different characteristics:
1) the IP (right to use),
2) the development (right to influence the direction of the code) and
3) the governance (right to make decisions like who's in charge).

Then, Andreas talks about comparing and constracting community models by two axes:
- governance model
- license type used.

Both Andreas and Joel seem to have similar ideas, and I think they both have very good characterizations. But, in addition to these, I'd like to add an other dimension. The three elements above talk about the rights. In addition to the rights I'd like to think about the reality; i.e. is anybody really using these rights. And if not, why not.

Let me give you an example. Suppose I start on open source project and put my stuff into the sourceforge under GPL. I then invite others to discuss and influence the direction of the code I'm developing. And invite them to contribute. I also say that any time somebody suggest to change the leader, I'm ready to step down if somebody else gets a majority vote. So now, in Joel's three dimension model presented above, this would be very open, eh?

But what if nobody shows up? What if nobody is interested in my project and I'm left alone to develop it. Or if somebody just takes bits of my code and uses them elsewere inside another project. Is my project then open? I theory it is, but really? I'd claim that the project is open only if people use their rights, show up and contribute, and thus make it open. To me open source is more about "doing it" -- less about theory or human rights. So, to make the project open I also need to get others involved.

Another interesting aspect by Joel was his study on corporate sponsored open source projects. Check this one out!

Other comments

A good summary of different projects was provided by Smancke. He compares different projects in terms of their openness.

Jaffa gives us some ideas and opinions on how to continue with maemo. He talks about the community involvment, openness and control. He says "Nokia need to take action to really push community involvement. Nothing's got for free: if Nokia aren't seen to be committed to the community, why should the community be committed to Nokia?" Good points, Jaffa!

Usability

Then last but not least, David opened up a discussion on usability and open source. He refered at a good article by Matthew Paul Thomas. An interesting topic that needs attention. While talking to different people, I hear a lot of similar concerns and discussions.

Thanks!

c-base

Greetings from the Maemo Summit here at c-base. Quim found us a cool place to have the Summit. You who didn't come -- you missed a lot! We are all here. Over 200!

A few new announcements about the current plans with Fremantle:

-WLAN / power management to open source

-Fremantle to support OpenGL

-Clutter -- altough there is a roadblock now ... but we're hopeful

We just had a nice lighting sessions. Alan ran OpenOffice in a Debian bubble within Maemo. Sebastian showed how Maemo devices can be used in police cars. Eduardo showed new Canola stuff on Qt. And so forth. Cool stuff. More here.

OSiM News -- What's up with Maemo?

I had a presentation at the OSiM conference in Berlin today. I discussed about the future of the Maemo software.

Bringing open source to consumer mainstream

Nokia operates in two worlds:
a) in a product and business world manufacturing and selling devices and services
b) in an open source –even in a free software world—participating in many projects and peer development groups

The open source and the corporate world used to be very different. But now they overlap more and more each day. This closeness provides very interesting opportunities, but also challenges. Our vision is to bring the innovation, quality and end user participation into consumer mainstream. Our vision is a fruitful and beneficial collaboration.

Photo: Ian McKellar

A suit -- a t-shirt

So the suits and the hackers! For the suits I have one warning. We have no product announcements today. And for the hackers, we are not educating anybody here, not even the Linux community. But I’ve got a good story to tell.

Maemo

Maemo.org is an open source project, sponsored and contributed by Nokia. It is both for the application developers and for the platform developers providing a means to work together.

Nokia uses Maemo.org as the foundation of its own Maemo software that currently fuels Nokia’s Internet Tablets, such as N800 and N810. Maemo is the first mobile project that takes the Linux desktop paradigm to mobile devices. I’d claim that Nokia essentially created the Mobile Internet Devices (MID) category with the Nokia 770. It included several internet centric applications, such as the desktop browser and VoIP and IM services, as opposite of PDA or Phone centric applications, such as PIM or telephony apps. And it was based on GNOME and Linux. And it was all about the touch screen from the very beginning.

A preview of the 5th Release

Maemo software evolution has progressed through 4 releases. It has powered several multimedia computers, such as the Nokia N810. It is now a time to introduce some of the future directions for the Maemo software.

The 5th release will include cellular connectivity for the High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) data. Maemo already supports WLAN, Bluetooth and WIMAX. With HSPA we can now build use cases for wireless broadband anywhere.

Maemo will enable more computing power by running on OMAP3 processors . OMAP3 enables laptop-like performance and advanced entertainment capabilities. It is based on the ARM® Cortex™-A8 superscalar microprocessor core.

Maemo platform will include support for high definition camera sensors. This enables new multimedia use cases such as instant photo tagging and sharing.

And like before, Maemo remains to be one of Nokia’s software options for Internet optimized multimedia computers.

The Linux Foundation

Nokia becomes Gold Sponsor of the Linux Foundation . Linux and open source is becoming more and more important to Nokia. Thus, increasing our contribution to the Linux Foundation and to the Linux kernel is a self-evident step for Nokia.

It is good to notice how well our goals are aligned already. Nokia’s vision is to bring open source and Linux to consumer mainstream. The Linux Foundation expresses its goals by saying:

...For Linux to remain open and attain the greatest ubiquity possible, important services must be provided, including legal protection, standardization, promotion and collaboration. The Linux Foundation has been founded to help close the gap between open source and proprietary platforms, while sustaining the openness, freedom of choice and technical superiority inherent in open source software.

As many of you know, we have been active in several open source projects, including the Linux kernel. Nokia has become today the first to contribute code on HSPA cellular connectivity for OMAP3 processor to Linux kernel.

Work in upstream is the way to contribute to community also in cellular connectivity area. It is our core way of working! As in most work with upstream projects, we start bottom up with our contribution. The first code on HSPA cellular connectivity was made public in the last 24 hours.

Later on, we intend to contribute to the Linux kernel the SSI (Synchronous Serial Interface) hardware driver for OMAP3, and the power management, link layer protocol, and the network layer protocol for the modem according to Nokia specs. Let’s work together!

Software Developed with the Community

Maemo.org community is the open source community that innovates on top and within the Maemo platform. We invite innovation not only on top of the platform but also into the platform as an experimental lab for innovations.

Maemo community has over 13.000 members today and works on over 600 projects. It is probably the biggest open source community for mobile Linux. As a part of the Maemo work, Nokia contributes to many other upstream open source projects such as GNOME/GTK+, Linux kernel, Debian, Gstreamer, Telepathy, etc. Nokia will shift more and more of its R&D work into open source mode to avoid forking.

Maemo Summit

Meet you soon there! Almost 200 participants and growing – just around the corner here in Berlin.