> you’ve previously claimed that Nokia isn’t doing anything wrong with respect to the
> open source community (and software developers in general) and that any wrongdoing
> is, in any case, old news.

I have not said that. And if you want to discuss the post relating to patents then please comment there. It’s ok if the software patents is your focus, but please understand that I enjoy writing and discussing about other topics in my humble blog.

Why do you keep thinking that I’m trying to defend or dress up Nokia or maemo with this post? In fact I’m helping to dissect how open maemo and similar corporate initiatives can be compared to other alternatives offering the full setting of a grassroots free software project. Going through the list is easy to see that any project sponsored by a single company gets fewer openness points compared to social and distributed initiatives like Debian, GNOME and so on.

Yet in real life more and less open organizations collaborate in order to increase the share and relevance of open source software, and this is good.

By the way. Do you really think that people hired by big companies can’t keep looking the world with a community perspective? Do you think all they do and say is on behalf the company that hires them some hours a day? Do you consider yourself part of a community I’m not part of? That would be a simplistic view.

My “agenda” is that you’ve previously claimed that Nokia isn’t doing anything wrong with respect to the open source community (and software developers in general) and that any wrongdoing is, in any case, old news. There wasn’t apparently any way of pointing out the discrepancies between your account and things which have been happening in the wider world, although I think sanjo sums up a part of my “agenda” by saying this:

“And I can see no official sign that their politics regarding this matter has changed.”

Perhaps I didn’t need to bother trying to document this assertion after all, but here we go:

http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2008/03/greetings-from-osim-usa.html#6463969074339554516

“Now, if you could discuss about the points made in my initial post that would be excellent.”

You tell us to look away from the licence and contribution policy of a project (which pretty much lie at the heart of some of Sun’s most publicised woes with OpenOffice.org and openSolaris) and to look at the transparency, and presumably the community integration in the project – whether, for example, outsiders get to the top of the tree and start calling the shots.

I don’t disagree that transparency in the way a project is governed is a good thing, but it’s disingenuous to talk about things like transparency without considering the wider contract between the community and any involved corporate entity. The biggest problem that a project owned by single corporate entity has is credibility: as a developer I want to know if I can be bothered to work (potentially for free) for a company which is not benevolent to my interests but who will potentially want to sell my work under a proprietary licence.

And that credibility issue brings in a lot more than just how transparent a project organisation is, including the very things you discard: the licence will turn away a lot of people for a start (openSolaris is far less interesting to me under the CDDL than under the GPL); the copyright assignment policy may cause people to wonder whether they’re not doing someone’s job for them (whereas submissions under a range of acceptable licences might not trigger the same suspicions); the trademark policy may alienate people who thought that they were supporting a movement that they identify with (as seen with openSolaris and Project Indiana); the patent policy might cause people to question whether by helping the corporate parent of the project, they might be endangering the rest of the community.

You might wave these concerns away and say that they’re peripheral or not central to the discussion, but all I can do is remind you that you’re looking out from the inside of a big company wondering whether a big company project might be perceived to be open based on a number of factors that you’ve drawn up, and I’m looking in from the outside and telling you what motivates people in the community. And what motivates people in the community quite often has a lot to do with the things on my “agenda”, with credibility being a big part of it.

I didn’t want to discuss about Nokia in this post but you seem to have a fixed agenda. Fine, but look: Nokia is not in the business of opening or closing. Nokia is in the business of shipping products to the mainstream, and this is the reason why someone like me felt attracted to join a company like this. Undermining my work? There are not many companies of this size paying salaries to open source enthusiasts and making deals with open source companies (that hire more open source enthusiasts).

The original point of my post is that big companies and small free software projects have very different organizational settings when it comes to openness (and many other things). This makes collaboration difficult. If you think it’s not worth or impossible to collaborate, then fair enough. If you, like me, think that collaboration between companies and open source projects is important then it is useful to see how these differences can be overcome.

Now, if you could discuss about the points made in my initial post that would be excellent. Thanks for your time!

It commands respect that someone might publish critical or admonishing comments they receive on their own blog in order to promote some kind of discussion, and I respect the fact that you have done so. However, I’m not inclined to play musical chairs with Sherlock Holmes just so that I can point out the supposedly fictional lobbying activities of Nokia employees.

As for the distinction between the openness of an organisation and that of a small part of it, which I imagine is why Nokia as a whole is “beyond the point”, I don’t think pockets of openness are sustainable in an organisation where the executives exchange puzzled looks when confronted with that part of the organisational chart. Personally, I wouldn’t want to work in a place where my own work is potentially being undermined by a bunch of people somewhere else in the same building, which is what you get with such arrangements which make mere concessions to openness.

At some point, I might try again and post the things that were dug up on Nokia and lobbying, although none of it was stuff that hasn’t been aired in public before, nor would it take much digging for anyone motivated enough to discover such material all by themselves.