Thread: Open source vs confidential products
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GeneralAntilles is offline GeneralAntilles
2009-04-19 , 15:29
Posts: 5,478 | Thanked: 5,222 times | Joined on Jan 2006 @ St. Petersburg, FL
#3
Originally Posted by ColdFusion View Post
I think the problem is that it has been soooo long ago we had any hw news and that's frustrating for some people.
This is exactly it. The community is stuck with a dead platform (Diablo), and obsolete hardware. You can only leave users with nothing to use and developers with nothing (the alpha SDKs don't count) to develop for before the frustration boils over into the endless bickering we've been seeing lately.

Originally Posted by qgil View Post
Open source is about software but most of the criticism towards lack of openness to Nokia in e.g. the thread linked above goes around hardware aka products.
Sure, but let's not pretend that there aren't plenty of complaints to level at Nokia's behavior towards software.

Originally Posted by qgil View Post
Then there are projects that have taken an open approach when producing hardware (OLPC, OpenMoko, OpenPandora, what else). As interesting as these projects are or have been, their open approach hasn't brought them a striking success. Yes, there are many reason to that and any comparison might be unfair.
Yes, these are unfair comparisons. Clearly you can't bank on open source and open hardware as your only asset (OpenMoko certainly doesn't have much else going for it), but there's not enough evidence to support the validity of the approach one way or the other. I'd certainly love to see Nokia become one of the first big players to try it out, though.
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Last edited by GeneralAntilles; 2009-04-19 at 15:33.
 

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