ScottishDuck | # 301 | 2011-05-30, 21:32 | Report

This thread can be shown to any business that considers releasing partial source for their operating system as a reason to remain entirely closed. All it does is spawn idiots with an inflated sense of entitlement that antagonise hard working developers. Good going folks.

abill_uk | # 302 | 2011-05-31, 02:20 | Report

Poll count today is 519 for and 21 against.

geneven | # 303 | 2011-05-31, 03:33 | Report

When has Nokia answered any question with a polite yes or no? For example a thread lasting thousands of messages essentially asked when if ever Nokia was going to provide support for Flash 10.1 for the N900.

What was Nokia's official answer? Nokia NEVER bothered to answer the question officially.

ScottishDuck | # 304 | 2011-05-31, 04:23 | Report

If we want an official answer we need to send a question to Nokia through official channels. A forum is not that.

geneven | # 305 | 2011-05-31, 04:59 | Report

Having worked for a major corporation that sold software it developed, I can say that whether a question asked by users was asked through official channels never was a consideration, not even once.

Texrat | # 306 | 2011-05-31, 05:21 | Report

Having worked in similar capacities, I can easily say that it can be cause for consideration. Too often the necessary people aren't monitoring forums and will never see the request. Hell I've lived in here for 5 years and miss a lot.

But the cold reality here is that the situation straddles intersecting technical, political and legal lines. That's a ***** to unravel.

Jaco2k | # 307 | 2011-05-31, 05:41 | Report

It is all fine and dandy but... how open is open? How open is Linux? The kernel is, for sure... but what about the drivers? Are they all open? No. Why should it be different on the phone? I think that most of what could have been opened on this phone already has. The rest, as said a million times, most likely is proprietary and carries other implications.

Yes, you can always change a graphics card on a PC for one that is more OSS friendly but I think you have to accept that we cannot mess with the reality of the HW configuration we got.

abill_uk | # 308 | 2011-05-31, 06:17 | Report

From another perspective as a former design engineer what can be done is to obtain data sheets on every single component requiring a driver and physically write the drivers into the os, run it as a loop untill no conflicts or halts occur but hell that is start from scratch situation and i do not envy any single dev to tackle it that way, so better a team get together armed with every single piece of data needed and work together creating with what is already available joining it all together untill you have something solid.

MeeGo adaption for the N900 needs ths team behind it to succeed hence why i am doubtful at this moment in time looking at previous work done up to what it actually is now.

What is really sad is on this Community already exsists enough devs to accomplish this but not all are part of the same team.

momcilo | # 309 | 2011-05-31, 07:33 | Report

Perhaps you should remember how these devices were branded. If I recall correctly, the majority of developers were interested because of the promise of an open platform. At that moment nobody new about closed bits.

If you compare this program (770,800,810,900) to Neo Freerunner project, you will see that there are many different distributions some of them still providing builds for the original green phone. This project has also suffered because closed bits(infamous glamo chip), but has managed to stay open to community.

I agree with you that there is no point in antagonizing nokias developers. Given the fact that this request will be most likely ignored, do you have a better idea?

momcilo | # 310 | 2011-05-31, 07:38 | Report

The first and major difference is that vendors usually support the graphic cards for several years. In our case support lasts from the point where one device gets released until next one get released. In this case we ended up with half-finished products.

This is precisely the reason the communities have started projects like:

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/


When I was younger, I thought the people like Richard Stallman are simply too militant. It looked like it is ok to have closed source drivers. Then one day nvidia decided to stop supporting graphic card, and I've found myself unable to upgrade to newer version of a distro without sacrificing 3d functionality. Since it was not crucial, there it went, but now there is a flood of all those shiny new 3D interfaces, what now?

Should I buy a new device, even if my old one is still functional?

Now, all of a sudden All that Richard was saying made sense.

---

Last edited by momcilo; 2011-05-31 at 07:56.