A popular pop song goes:
Girls don’t like boys, girls like cars and money;
Boys will laugh at girls when they’re not funny
So we’re talking about mutual benefit, not necessarily mutual interests. Kind of like corporate collaborating with open source?
I listened to the Twit episode on Maemo where the guy being interviewed talked a bit about being on board with Nokia as a collaborator between corporate and open source community. The Nokia guy, Quim Gil, speaks about how the corporate deadlines, tight structure, and mission-critical secret plans contrast with the open nature of the project’s community. According to Gil, both Nokia and the community benefits: by relying on community contributed work, development costs are slashed five-fold when compared to a totally in-house effort. In return, the OS projects also get a boost: Gil mentions bluez, gstreamer, and telepathy as places where Nokia has made their mark.
Also mentioned was Apple, which dominates mobile and at the same time remains completely closed. It’s completely not open source yet popular and successful. I definitely am not meant to mess with anything other than the App and Music store have to offer in exchange for money, but I’ve also the option of jailbreaking and unlocking. But this is of course a war being fought between Apple and the community as firmware updates get pushed to lock down the device and device owners try to find another way out.
Is one better than the other? In the end it definitely boils down to what I can do with my gear. I want to be able to do what I want with my hardware, and I resent it if the reason I can’t make that happen is artificial and arbitrary. Open source software is nice in this respect. I recently saw a survey of Maemo and Openmoko community members, and an overwhelming majority say that the reason they actively participate in their respective community is to improve the software that they use and love. But the iPhone is a polished product, and circumventing DRM with a jailbreak gives me freedom to do what I want. That sort of freedom probably is enough that people don’t have to care about open source freedom. I guess strictly from a user’s point of view, there’s no difference as long as it just works.
From a business point of view, I’m not sure what to think. Okay, it’s easy to complain about closed-source development that try to control the user, but Gil mentioned that deadlines need to be met and a community format might not be reliable. Open source seems like a guerrilla tactic when considering it, letting companies without the resources of Apple build upon an existing active project. But even then, development probably starts with a fork where the company takes a structured approach akin to closed source development, after which code contributions can be fed back to the project. From Apple’s success and what Gil says, it seems it isn’t necessarily better to have an open source model for business.
Anyways, I’ve babbled enough and am still trying to understand this stuff. Here’s a link to the Maemo podcast and the survey:
http://twit.tv/floss54
http://public.smi.ethz.ch/files/MaemoOpenmoko/PublicDescriptiveStatistics.html
