)) No way! I loved tinkering, but I love driving a good car more!

@Sopwith
Well said.
As to the teams of hundreds of people smarter than us, well I don't know about you, but in my case that just isn't possible. And I find your suggestion to go to MIT to learn computers preposterous: I already have my degree in a completely different field, and I do not see why this should prevent me from writing up some C code when I want a calculation to finish today instead of next week - well, is this enough for fighting against proprietary system? Believe me, although it looks like, I'm not saying smarter people should be everywhere, but I believe their knowledge HAS to be much higher than mine, as a non pro.

Besides that, I can't really find something I could argue against, from what you've replied.

@ARJWright
The only thing I'm really afraid of, regarding Maemo and Nokia, is for the experiment to miserably fail against too good of a marketing and management / company driven strategy Apple is up to. Really!

@blue_led
Sadly, your type is the one who really scares me to death about Romania...

Thanks onutz, I am glad that we can come to some agreement.

I think it is very important to fight against proprietary systems. I am not a software developer myself and I admittedly do not see much difference in usability between free or closed OSs. However, I feel I can trust the open source community, while I have a huge mistrust for the closed source software, whether it is made by Apple, MS, Google or Nokia. I am not saying the latter is necessarily bad, I am just saying I do not trust it. Can you trust anything that by definition is kept secret from you?

@Sopwith
Can you trust anything that by definition is kept secret from you?
Yes, at least food recipes )

Now, seriously, I don't know if it's about trusting sw or companies / brands, but it's about securing the revenues, the employees jobs, the third parties deals and so on. In my article I say that on the long run, closed source does all the above better than open source.

I think that if apple does not open the source of its operating system, they will become not competent enough. I think that this will be a norm in the commings years for computer industry.

Actually, if a company's product relies on open source software they definitely have a different business plan than companies like Apple.
They are most likely selling complete hardware/software solutions (small companies to big companies as IBM do that) and therefore make most of their their money with contracts and services.

Returning to maemo, Nokia and Apple. Nowadays everybody can order and build a complete PC piece for piece. But almost no one can build his/her own mobile device. When it comes to this you have to look at Apple/Nokia as hardware manufacturers. As hardware manufacturers that build devices at a quality only few other competitors can keep up with. And again, the hardware in combination with the system does the trick.

What happens if someone comes up with an iTunes like service using an open standard allowing to use the service comfortably with maemo, android, iPhone etc.? Will people still be bound to Apple? Isn't this risky in the end? Should Apple try to prevent, that something like mentioned above happens to save its revenues and jobs?

I absolutely disagree with you, saying that closed source software does a better when job when it comes to saving revenues, jobs etc. Openness encourages innovation and innovation saves and creates new jobs. I know this sound pretty naive, but so does the statement, that closed source is better at saving revenues and jobs.

@jinx
I got your point.
Then how do you think Apple blocking Adobe's flash on iPhone has impacted in revenue and market share, compared to flash free Nokia N97 / N900?

Do you think Apple looses money on that, whilst Nokia is making money over the same thing? Do you think Apple's 3rd parties devs are more secured or less secured now, today, because of this strategy?

Is anybody building flash browser based apps especially for Nokia and making money?

Open source is good, it's the best solution for a new business. But remember both Apple and Nokia are far from developing new business.

I'm telling you what I see now: iPhone gains more traction, while N97 is dead and buried and N900 is striving harder than maybe any other Nokia product.

edited: Don't forget about huge html5 deployment soon to come

Well, you are right. Apple is blocking flash mainly because they do not want to allow flash games on the iPhone. This would be a threat to the app store. But to be honest, we all know a closed app store like Apple's will never succeed in the long run. It's a corset users will want to get rid of.

When comparing the iPhone to the N97 the iPhone will win, because for most uses cases it is the better device. It had a unique user interface tailored to the touchscreen. It's intuitive and easy to use, while the N97 has a standard symbian which also allows touchscreen input, but it is not optimized for it. Of course there is still this *sexyness* factor, when it comes to Apple devices, but let's leave that out of the discussion for now.

Yepp, I'm looking forward to HTML5 and I youtube will definitely switch. However, flash is attractive to developers, although limited in its possibilities, because you do not have to port the app to multiple platforms. So, the Flash discussion most likely will not die. Especially now, that Adobe is scared Flash will die earlier than they thought and is trying hard to fix flash support on Mac.

Nevertheless, what we definitely have to do in the further discussion is to separate device, OS and services as the app store. I see no point in the OS being closed source. It does not prevent a company from running an app store and making money out of it.

greetings,
jinx