Engadget Game

Now this was nice:
Handheld of the Year Readers’ Choice: Nokia 770
Engadget Pick: Nokia 770

An then, who gets the credits? Some names seen at the Internet Tablet Talk. But, really, the credits should not go to Aris or Jannes. Yes, we sure look good, but that is not enough here.

The creation of 770 and maemo.org has truly been a bottom-up effort. Done by the team. We are lucky to have guys that believed in the product, worked through holidays and weekends, had the skills and courage to make right decisions, and finally the patience to work on bugs and problems.

This is not lip service. This has really been different from a regular Nokia project. I claim that people were enpowered to do right decisions -- and no executive should take any credit on anything else but this enpowerment! All the work has been done by the engineers, designers, testers, project managers, partners, friends in various communities, etc.

I wish I could list the names -- but they are too many. But go and meet the real dudes at fosdems, debconfs, guadecs and other such places. And, maybe .... you can call them Henry!

Where is Henry now?

Free -- as free beer

I participated the first Open Tuesday event here at Helsinki just a few hours ago. So, there actually are occasions where open source means free beer!

Helsinki is a small town and I though I know quite a few people that work with open source. I was surprised to see so many new faces -- people I've never seen before. Many of the people that showed up were not particularly into Linux or open source. They were just curious about open source in general.

A lot of talk

So, everybody knows about Linux. TV and magazines talk about it. All my friends ask me about Nokia and Linux. My next door neighbor told me the other day that he's got an old PC with no use and that he'd like to try Linux on it.

But nobody that I know uses Linux, Gnome, or any of that -- with the exception of those that I work with, of course. My neighbor downloaded Ubuntu but to my knowledge never installed it. We've got the buzz but no actual users.

But why is that? There are many reasons. It is not possible to go and buy a PC with pre-installed Linux in it -- not from a regular consumer electronics shop anyway. Getting a Linux distro and installing it is far too complicated for a regular user, when the alternative is just to use the pre-installed XP. If you want to do music, play games, make home movies, presentations, documents -- or almost anything -- XP or Mac is far more user friendly and powerful. (If you wanna run your own web server, then maybe ....)

How about phones and stuff? Phones based on Symbian, Microsoft, or some home-grown operating systems are more usable and powerful than any Linux based phone I've played with.

Henry wanted!

So, we've got a long way to go. Open source is where horses vs. cars were early last century. Horses and wagons were more reliable, faster, easier to operate, and supported by the infrastructure. However, cars changed everything. The basic concept was superior and Henry Ford figured out how to get it to masses.

With open source, we've got the engines, brakes, chassis and all that figured out now. And, we've got the world class manufacturing process through peer-to-peer production. But where is Henry?

A strategy

It’s been busy lately -- so something totally different now. Let me try to compare our open source approach with that of others developing Linux based consumer products.

Open source can support different strategies

So let’s suppose you’ve decided to create a consumer product –a device-- based on open source. Utilizing open source gives you certain boundaries to work in. It also gives you many new possibilities. For example, utilizing GPL mandates that you release your source code. In some cases this can be a restriction. However, GPL also means that you can use the code developed by others freely – just remember copyleft. Also, if somebody now wants to extend your GPL’d work, they can do it efficiently because you have released the source code they can work on.

How do you deal with open source and developer may vary a lot, though. Now, let’s take two different perspectives.

1) Own involvement –proxies vs. own involvement

a. Do you as a device manufacturer use commercial distros and integrators, or do you rather work directly with open source communities
b. Do you get your components from montavistas, redhats, trolltechs, and such, or do you grab them yourself from debian, kernel.org, GNOME etc
c. Do you rather make a business deal with a commercial company that should take care of the details of open source on your behalf, or do you rather participate open source work yourself to get what you want

2) Development environment –closed vs. open native development
a. Do you want to open your software for hacking and native application development, or do you want to keep it closed and support only application sandboxes, such as Java, on top of your software

Let me take a concrete example. Our friends at Motorola produce nice Linux phones. To my knowledge, they use MontaVista kernel and Trolltech’s Qt/embedded and Java as a developer platform. We on 770 went directly to GNOME and kernel.org and decided not to use commercial distros or middleware packages. We also allow native Linux application development. And we want to use the latest versions of components as soon as we can – a goal that a proxy would make more difficult to achieve. So the strategy is different. No better nor worse – just different.



Own Involvement -- I believe that big corporations often rather make a business deal with a “proxy company” than deal with small hacker companies or do to sourceforge themnselves. They are used to have NDAs, LOIs, frame agreements, partnerships, purchase orders, and invoices from other big companies. They may not want to worry too much about this open source stuff. The proxy companies hide the open source aspect of the work and you are dealing with simple old software component vendors.

Development environment – depending on your goals and needs, supporting a sandbox as an application development environment may be a good idea in cases where you need more control, portability, and other such things.

So, I’m not saying it is good or bad to be in any particular place on the map. But I think it is important you know where you are.

A rumor

I Finnish technology newspaper Tietoviikko said yesterday that Nokia doesn’t want to develop own operating systems, and that maybe the successor of 770 would run MontaVista’s Linux. They quoted a Monta Vista marketing person there. Well, I bet MontaVista is doing a good job and they seem to have many customers in the consumer electronics space. However, our software for 770 is sourced directly from kernel.org and the middleware from Gnome, GTK, Gstreamer, etc. So we are not developing an “own operating system” for 770. And really, our strategy to not use proxies is serving us very well, thank you ;-)