another Maemo lesson - limit your trust to corporations

Open development/Licensing change requests has now interesting header which brings more light and relate to previous post:

Please note that this process is effectively dead. Please see http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=784443 for details. Summary: Nokia doesn't have a Maemo distmaster anymore to process these requests, and does not plan to allocate further resources for Maemo to change this, rather than just trying to make the corresponding Meego components open.

by Josh

and further

Note: *Nothing* was ever opened via this process.

by Jebba

with written aside "a sequence that might help you understand more the current situation" by qgil .

and quote from document on why closed things stay closed (and as you see, never become open, even if someone trying to master "process to open").

Reasons for closed packages

Open source is the licensing model preferred by Nokia in the development of Maemo. There are some reasons to have exceptions, though.

• Brand: Nokia wants to keep a strong brand and identity avoiding any risks of dilution.
• Differentiation: Nokia wants to gain competitive advantage in certain areas by keeping the related software closed.
• Legacy: Nokia keeps some components minimally maintained - the work of opening them has an unclear outcome.
• IPR & licensing issues: Nokia avoids serious risks brought by patents, copyrights or complicated licensing situations.
• Security: Nokia avoids safety risks and liabilities that could be caused by freeing access to certain hardware components.
• Third party: Nokia does not own the code and therefore does not decide on the license.

corporations rarely or never give up on own or peer's interest.

more Linux / Maemo job - open positions at Nokia

I had been posting about open job postions within Maemo few times by now - [1] [2] [3] . Now my colleagues in HR has decided to invite even MORE people -- several vacant positions open in USA, Finland and India please read at the bottom.

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The Linux-based Maemo platform is the software that powers mobile devices such as the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. To make the Maemo platform even more powerful, we at the Maemo SW entity in Devices R&D are now looking for people to take it to the next level as part of the applications and platform development teams.

Nokia is hiring skilled and motivated professionals to develop the Linux based Maemo platform.


www.nokia.com/imaginemaemo - this link is not valid anymore.

instead you have to go www.nokia.com/careers, click into Careers link/picture and then use keyword... yes, maemo

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more Nokia jobs within open source and Maemo

my colleague Quim Gil has noted that his team is looking for somebody, who is very good at serving developers, i.e. position of product manager of the Maemo development platform at Nokia

also, for those who want to look straight for Maemo software related jobs (i.e. you want to work with Maemo, Linux, Nokia tablets, etc) among all open positions at Nokia , there is special section at maemo.org site named "maemo jobs" - have a look and please don't miss that "next" at bottom, as there is more than one page at the moment ;)

on maemo, open source and business

my colleague recently noticed that Openmoko turn of strategy is very synchronous to what Nokia only contemplates... are they one step ahead or making piggy-back-in-future investments again? :)

another side of open source coin

after conversation with my colleague on our internal-and-yet-not-clear-whether-it-will-ever-float-at-all project, i just had interesting thought - apart from all this saliva-dropping "Open source über alles" shouted slogans, there is one thing good of being not in corporation: you write app, they use it, but there is nobody to go after you, if it somehow goes around of law (quite often written for it's own lawyer's raison d'être).

Which in turns begs an answer for question(s)... I hear very often that people out there almost beg for PIM-and-alike small business tools for our Nokia tablet - yet, inside our team this topic... no, it is not a taboo but sort of getting many just looking on the walls as if you were not present and asking - no, no hidden agenda or alike, it is just consequence of doom business in PDA market, and nobody want his career go down. So, may be it makes sense to launch yet another open source project? No, PIM for Maemo may be a good tool set and good starting point but it is very far from Hildon design paradigms (e.g.think of thumbing up on this, especially with only one finger/thumb free for that) and frankly need some deeper re-design, not only ugly PDA-caused UI