I like Linux and open source a lot.
I like the philosophies and how it got started and grew.

What I don't like, and this is rather topical today, is what happens when a corporation develops and promotes an open sourced platform.

As with Maemo, we have an open sourced platform that runs on a certain company's devices. It creates an active community around it and benefits from countless hours of volunteer developments that in turn attracts more users to the devices.

Open sourced. Community. Full disclosure. Hug a tree.
All is good..

But, since this open sourced platform runs exclusively on devices from a publicly traded company there can never be true, full disclosure of events pertaining to these devices OR the operating system that runs on them.

This creates a pseudo-open-community where the actual users/participants are very vested into the ideology behind open sourced and, as in the case with Maemo, are amongst themselves (and to any iPhone fanboy) always ready to declare how incredible this is and that open sourcing is amazing and how locked in and fooled any Droid, iPhone, etc users are - but all of this without actually knowing or being able to influence their own future.

One day the corporation decides to change the roadmap and either go with another operating system or cancel the plans for the actual devices. Suddenly, big surprise. Why didn't we know? That's it.

Had it been a 'regular' (in lack of better word) distro of Linux development would just continue and be used on millions of other laptops, desktops and servers out there.

Open sourced platforms that are dedicated to run on niche devices produced exclusively by one (or a few) publicly traded companies can not, should not be considered 'open'. They are owned and run by the company that allows the users to, for the time, develop on it. That source code for applications are made available makes it technically open sourced but in the end everyone is as locked in and ruled by, in this case Nokia, as any iPhone owner is by Apple.

It is becoming very common that projects can be, in themselves, open source, but their governance, is not open.

Yeah, it's one of the things we were talking about over at my site. In fact, I wrote an article on it that the future of open source is corporately controlled distros. Of course, that was only looking at the Linux side of things. There will be a lot of mainstream apps that will become corporately controlled as well. It's a rather odd catch22. You can't be mainstream without mainstream power. IE, a corporation or powerful foundation behind you.

It's like the space shuttle. It is big, powerful, and looks cool, but without the big booster engines, she's not getting off the pad. Needing that kinda power is somewhat the fault of Microsoft and other big software and tech companies. They raised the bar so high that only companies with lots of money can go mainstream anymore. And the corporate world is doing all they can to reinforce that, keeping the bar as high as possible to lock out all the little upstarts who want to come in and play on their ball field.

is a very complicated point. some people think that ELITISM have the same efect. thats why ubuntu has a place where debian fails to be.

also, the existence of maemo has pushed a pack of open source modules to the kernel´s main tree AFAIK

some people thinks that the freedom of opensouce is the right to fork. also, that was killing the linux community by creating short lived distros here and there

i still dont know what kind of freedom will prevail

I think it would be instructive to review/lookup what the 4 basic rights /freedom of what 'open' source are before discussing this topic.

I wish Maemo was fully opensource. The firmware apps, for example aren't opensource. Imagine how much better the phone app, calendar or contacts would be by now if they were opensourced.

The only reason that I can think of as to why these firmware Nokia apps are not opensource is because Nokia are afraid they will be endlessly supporting bugs that aren't generated inhouse. So, why can't they make the methods known so that we can at least create our own replacement phone app??? :|

'Desktop' open source started out on commoditized machines which are assembled from interchangeable parts based on open standards.

Until we see mobile devices with similar traits (commoditized, modularized, open standards), then it's a different game with different rules.

Corporate or non-transparent controlled projects tend to not get many outside contributors. Sadly it's happening all over the place with various projects. One of the main reasons is that a lot of the corps want to get a copyright assignment(think sun with oo.o) from any contributor. This allows them to then turn those changes into their own profits.

Now some people wouldn't have a problem with that. But some do(more do than don't) and simply decide not to contribute.

The other thing is non-transparent governance. Any project that starts that way tends to not get a lot of developers. Any project that changes later has a lesser chance of losing a lot of the contributors but some will invariably leave.

Lord Raiden: wrt to corporately owned. Won't really happen. Mozilla corp is trying to sell xul to as many people as it can(and through it support I bet), redhat is selling support, suse is selling support, oracle is selling support, nokia is selling hardware, google is selling services and ads. So you see most corp owned/controlled software has some sort of financial plan but anything community tends to put the user first. And yes even small community distros have a higher chance of living for a long time than large corp controlled.

clasificado: the four freedoms of Free Software specify: free to use it as you see fit and for any purpose, free to modify it for any purpose, free to redistribute a modified version for any purpose, free to get the source of any version you get the binary to - this is just a quick run down and short

So yes freedom to fork is always valid. And no forking does NOT splinter the community. Sometimes a fork is helpful in a way that it will use more experimental options but feed those changes back to the origin. Sometimes a fork is necessary due to unknown future(MariaDB(I think that's the new name)(previously MySQL)), sometimes there are other issues(example Source Mage fork from Sorceror(the lead developer at the time decided that he will use his own proprietary license etc...). So yes there are many reasons for forks. Some are good some are bad(forking for the sake of forking is always bad).

See Linux(and yes I am talking about the kernel which is indeed called Linux - not any specific distribution which I would name distro, GNU/Linux etc...) itself... it's forked into so many places(basically each distro uses it's own) but they still all cooperate.

(I'm sorry to mention MeeGo here as it's mentioned all over the place allready, but I got the feeling I could read about it between the lines here...)

I'm not sure it will represent fail as far as open source with a large corp is concerned. Some say it will lead to more openness. Now there's two behemots, not one and a stated plan to have a generalized platform for different devices.

It would be logical to push for open drivers and two behemots can push more than one. Now, I don't trust corporations to sincerely look to anything but the bottom line, so time will tell.

I feel the thread title was a bit misleading, since the fail lies in whatever in the OS is not open source. Maybe some quotes or the prefix semi- would have made it clearer.

If support for the N900 is dropped, let's hope enough is open and that whatever closed bits are good enough so that it can thrive for years to come with community support.

Wow, a thread on tmo that's actually worth reading and as of yet there are no reactionary opinions of no value. Hell must be freezing over

It is a difficult topic though, the lack of transparency in the name of corporate advantage is what ultimately ruins communities built around projects, I know that first hand from other ones.

They are not chucking the "corporate advantage" phrase out of the window with MeeGo, with all that "working in the open and fully open-source" mantra, are they? Of course not, they are corporations, there is no ideology behind them other than making money, they may believe that the open-source strategy will make them money, they don't "believe" in open-source, even if some of the people there really do.

And rightfully so, it wouldn't make any sense at all to tell people at Maemo Summit 2009 that e.g. "we are going to drop Maemo5 support after 4 or 5 updates anyway, because this MeeGo merger is coming, and Maemo6 is an instance of MeeGo, but they'll all have Qt4.6, so applications will work the same on all of them, although we are switching from the tried and true apt-get Debian package system to RPM, so scrap everything you've learned about packaging from the last 5 years and really..." and on and on and on.

Sharing information about future plans with users must be a pain in the *** for corporations. They don't want the competition to know ("corporate advantage") and they don't want to look stupid when they don't deliver as promised (we're still waiting for Flash 10.1) or the promised dates are unrealistic (portrait mode for the browser). If I was a corporation, I wouldn't share a damn thing with the users about future plans (the Apple strategy), you'll never look bad this way.

And we punish corporations for trying to be more transparent whenever a promised date slips or a promised feature doesn't go into production devices.

Now, if sharing future plans with the community is such a pain in the ***, who in their right mind is even going to consider including the community in the process of shaping those plans? This brainstorm thing? This is only a morale booster for the community, to make it feel like we have any influence at all.

True, we might have *some* influcence about *some* minor things, *if* we *all* mob together by voting on bugs in bugzilla, but that's it. I think we should be happy with what we have, as even this level of transparency and control for a big corporation is unprecedented. The community should come to terms with it, ultimately the vocal minority of people who complain the most had nothing of value to contribute, so if we lose them, so be it.