"Nokia doesn't contribute at all to open source projects!"
 

The title of this thread isn't my opinion. It's what I hear in discussions like "Which is more open, Android or Maemo?".

I have an idea of how Nokia does in fact contribute to the projects that form the base of Maemo. But this idea is vague, not many hard facts.

Yes, there's a little information about it:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Open_developme..._contributions
http://opensource.nokia.com/contributions.html

These 2 pages aren't very enthusiastic, though. They'd fail to convince me that the Maemo team @ Nokia (or Nokias money @ other companies) does anything useful for the whole ecosystem.

What I'd like to read as a FOSS enthusiast is human interest articles about how Nokia made this and this possible in project XY and how this is now part of the latest Ubuntu release and blah blah... Or how much faster the developers of project YZ reached a stable version because of the money Nokia invested and the testing they did.

I want to read these success stories not as a technophile, but as a Maemo user who wants to be proud of what Maemo and Nokia contribute to the free software world.
I want other people (people who work on Nokia.supported projects... and people whose projects aren't related to Maemo, but use libraries influenced by Nokia) to tell me how welcome and useful the contibution was. I want to see these peole, so there must be photos and smiling faces everywhere. I want at least two new stories a month, and I want to be able to send links to all articles tagged "bluez" or "pulseaudio" to people interested in the very subject.

In short:
I want Nokia to tell the world what they do, so I have facts when in a chat I need to explain why I believe Google's development model for Android is, really, not more open than Nokia's for Maemo.

Would such a site help anyone else but me?

Most probably yes. It wouldn't influence sales directly. Consumers don't care. But it should make Maemo win the sympathy of a developer or two. The type of developers who wants to be in the "good" camp when writing free software. From what I read online, most of those still think of Maemo as "Nokia taking from the community but never giving back".

How could such a site come to life?

Nokia's PR could create it. It should be considered their job.
Realistically, a Maemo enthusiast may step forward and do it, maybe as part of an already existing blog. But he/she would still have the problem of knowing about these facts. Where's the one source of information that could realistically give you everything you'd need to know in order to write such regular articles? It's still Nokia, right? I mean, they would at least have to say what they contribute where, then somebody else could do interviews and write a story. Or is there any other way to reliably see where the Maemo team is involved? Any ideas?

Re: "Nokia doesn't contribute at all to open source projects!"
 

Does UBIFS count?

Re: "Nokia doesn't contribute at all to open source projects!"
 

Think about the QT cross-platform framework which Nokia invested a lot into and is now available across Symbian as well. QT is open source, and Nokia kept it that way and encouraged its growth after acquiring Trolltech (the producers of QT).
Also Nokia contributed code to the trunk version of KOffice (on which Freoffice is based), which is the office suite in KDE.
I'm sure there are other examples as well.
I wouldn't say Nokia fully embraces open source though, but they are learning and are working with the open source movement, otherwise Maemo wouldn't be here. In time they might become more open themselves (the lack of NDA for the testing of the PR1.1 firmware shows steps in this direction). It is still a corporation though, and it needs to protect its business interests, so don't expect miracles.

Re: "Nokia doesn't contribute at all to open source projects!"
 

Linux comes from Finland, same as Nokia. Has Finland not given enough? :D

Re: "Nokia doesn't contribute at all to open source projects!"
 

isn't the whole telepathy stuff heavily pushed by nokia, or at least nokia employees? Or did I get that wrong.
Also KDE developers I talked with said some positive things about nokia - seems they handle QT quite well.

Re: "Nokia doesn't contribute at all to open source projects!"
 

- OSF sponsorship
- Maemo code pushed upstream

Re: "Nokia doesn't contribute at all to open source projects!"
 

Benny1967 I agree with you.

Nokia is doing it's bit with Koffice and QT. We need to hear more.

Re: "Nokia doesn't contribute at all to open source projects!"
 

I think Bluez would be an example of Nokia working with the FOSS. And now bluetooth support is way better in desktop Linux.

Re: "Nokia doesn't contribute at all to open source projects!"
 

They seem to have done quite some contirbutions to the kernel itself in the past:
http://lwn.net/Articles/301380/ lists them on place 5 under "Most active 2.6.27 employers" for changed lines of code.

Re: "Nokia doesn't contribute at all to open source projects!"
 

nokia purchased all the shares in symbian LTD, then was a founder member of Symbian Foundation where they handed most of all they acquired back and made it open source.
it cost them a reported $430.000.000 to get the last 52% of symbian limited so if thats not contributing to open source i dont know what is