Forget now about labels and conventions: there is not such thing as free software, like there is not such thing as free speech. There are free developers and free speakers, and they are the ones setting the limits of freedom of their products and actions. If they are not free, how free can be the result of their actions?

The license and contribution policy of a piece of open source software might tell something about how free it is. What is really useful though is to look at the levels of openness and freedom in the organization that develops, integrates and distributes that code.

How open is an organization? Consider this checklist as a barometer:

Identity

• Clear mission - Full disclosed objectives.
• Declared commitments - Affinities and aversions explained.
• Explicit connections outside - Relationships with other organizations listed.

Structure

• Horizontal organization - Teams and facilitators work on responsibilities and agreements.
• Identified contributors - Who is who, people is reachable.
• Clear responsibilities - Who is in charge or what.
• Activities described - All the ongoing work is acknowledged.

Operation

• Open participation - Anybody can access the information and get a first responsibility.
• Meritocracy - Responsibilities are acquired (or lost) based on own skills and contributors’ support.
• Voluntary (non-)engagement - Nobody is forced to be involved or to keep responsibilities.

Information

• Regular reports - Reported activities and future plans allow monitoring and participation.
• Information accessible - Even internal operational information is available by default.
• Explicit confidentiality - It is explained what areas are confidential, why and who access them.

Goods

• Economic model - Feasibility and sustainability plans are exposed.
• Resources - Inventory of items detailing who contributed what and why.
• Public accounts - It’s clear where the money comes from and where it goes.

How was your rating?

All this came to mind because it is in the organizational setting where the average corporation collides with the average open source community, and compromises need to be made from both sides. The result in many cases is the creation of a third way picking elements from both contexts, like maemo today. How open is maemo? How open could and should it be?

The debate about Sun trying to do the right thing has jumped to maemo and is evolving interestingly. Nokia is also trying to do the right thing, but this is a topic for another day. I just wanted to share an old text I wrote five years ago and never got the time to translate to English: El paradigma de la organización abierta.

Image by researchexchange (some rights reserved)

Are you going to LinuxTag this year? Berlin, end of May. Who would you like us to invite to discuss about maemo stuff [EDITED: on Thursday 29th]?

Many times when Nokia members like myself try to discuss further on open source involvement the argument on software patents comes back. For instance, in my last blog post about Connecting open source and mobile users - the Nokia plan. There are many good comments about patents in the thread. One puts it in the classical accusation:

> Why are Nokia’s representatives lobbying for software patents in the European
> Union and in various other locations?

If you care about the topic you can help by providing more precision and data in the accusation and the demands: Is Nokia really lobbying for software patents nowadays? Which countries are we talking about apart from the EU? What does “lobbying” exactly mean? What would you find reasonable about Nokia dealing with software patents?

A FFII report made four years ago seems to be the source of the complaints, but what was that action and where it stands today? Are there more original sources to look at? Searching the Internet most of the stuff seems to be echoes and opinions resonating each other and sometimes linking to the original FFII source.

All this is what I’m investigating these days. I’m no expert in the topic but I’m familiar with the No Software Patents campaign, I know some of the colleagues involved in Intellectual Property at Nokia and I have this journalist background so helpful sometimes. After a first round I’m quite optimistic seeing progress on this issue only by communicating more and better what is Nokia actually thinking and doing about software patents.

Some basic hints about the topic I found interesting to learn about:

• There are traditional patents on engineering inventions (i.e. hardware) that are out of question in the No Software Patents discussion. Then there are purely software patents - the matter discussed. But there are also patents on software-interacting-with-hardware which in the case of Nokia, a company shipping devices with software inside, are very relevant. The boundaries between these boxes are not always clear.
• Nokia is patenting software, just like the rest of its direct competitors do. Software patents do exist at least in the United States and not following that game can be so expensive (companies shipping patented features have to pay the owners of the patents) to rule you practically out of the market. The patent game might bring you to court and probably to huge indemnifications… probably not if you are a free software developer hacking for fun but surely if you are a wealthy company with successful products sold in boxes in the market. Search for patent litigation in the IT industries (many of the big companies you know have been to court because of this) and you will see the numbers.
• There are basically two attitudes for a company when playing the patent game: preventive and aggressive. Preventive means that you patent in order to make your own products getting some advantage and being well positioned when it comes to make compensation roundups with your competitors. Aggressive means that you use patents as a primary mean to damage competitors or even make a business around patent pledges. Nokia plays preventive, and specially when it comes to deal with the open source community the strategy is not to be aggressive at all. There was this formal precedent: Nokia announces patent support to the Linux Kernel. Beyond press releases, the respect about the achievements of open source development is part of our daily work (contributing Nokia to this open source success as well).

Let’s move forward in this debate. No need to campaign or flames: good arguments are enough. I’m also happy facilitating the contact between the organizations working against software patents and the right people at Nokia. I’m sure already today there are less discrepancies than most people think, and any exchange will be fruitful.

Image by takomabibelot (some rights reserved).

Check out Nokia’s point of view on What Mobile Users Need and How Open Source Can Help, in the words of Ari Jaaksi (listen - read - slides). Building upstream following community rules is in the heart of this plan. This is what Nokia has been doing, learning and contributing back a lot. Now it’s time to dive deeper.

More to come. If you have questions or proposals just shot.

Image: Dive into summer, by Ben McLeod (some rights reserved)

Next week I’m flying to San Francisco to take part in the Open Source in Mobile USA conference and spend some extra days meeting people in the Bay Area. My role in product management at Nokia is evolving and I’m taking more responsibilities over open source in general, beyond the maemo development platform.

Ari Jaaksi (director of Open Source Operations) has a talk on Wednesday morning: Understanding What Mass Market Mobile Users Need and How Mobile Open Source Solutions can Help Achieve This. Kate Alhola (maemo support in Forum Nokia + tablet hacker herself) will be attending as well, along with other California based work mates.

There is already an informal meeting being cooked around GNOME Mobile on Tuesday at lunchtime. I’m happy organizing something informal i.e. a maemo dinner to discuss and laugh in that way no email or blog can beat. Let me know if you are interested, here in the comments or at quim dot gil nokia com. This is an open proposal, not even tied to the conference. maemo love / interest is just enough!

Hot topic these days: Mobile applications, RIP - Offline web applications. Of course the Web2.0 guys (let me put it this way) have an agenda, but the developers tied to native environments have it as well. What to believe? There are many moving targets these days.

In the last years we have seen the omnipresent web eating space to the native desktop, from webmail and remote Flash games to the Google suite and the desktop inside browser experiments. This fight is getting tougher in the mobile context, where many factors seem to oppose resistance to classic software development: platform fragmentation, unstable API, demanding UI, restrictive write access, security buzz… We are even hearing about learning curves when it comes to compare C, C++ or Java to the languages brought by the WWW assisted by envisioned web APIs that will do the rest for you (apparently).

Native development had a safe past in mobile devices thanks to its optimized use of resources and its 99,9% professional/commercial motivation, but things are changing. The devices are getting more powerful allowing a thicker layer of abstraction without affecting dramatically the performance. Light application development is favoured by Flash, widgets and the web family of languages running offline. Microsoft’s Silverlight, Adobe’s Air, S60’s Web Run-Time… they are already here. Even something like Facebook development is getting increasing attention/fuzz. Thankfully the W3C is also approaching the field.

How Linux and open source developers are taking all this?

PS: I’m personally curious about Python and Ruby in this context, having both offline/runtime and online/net success stories.

PS2: True, I didn’t mention Android or the iPhone SDK.

There is something beautiful in here, somehow. Click to enlarge.

Troll Door, by Irish Typepad

Nokia going after Trolltech and Trolltech going inside Nokia, that’s an interesting move. Somewhat surprising move (I also knew about it by reading the press releases), but sensible in fact. The community reactions have been as interesting. No wonder, in this story you can find all the elements for a free software soap opera and for hilarious pub-level discussions as well. I believe the actual steps are slightly less emotional, though.

Obviously people want to know how this affects to maemo, and I made some research to confirm the guess. When it comes to maemo, there are no Trolltech/Qt related plans at the moment. As you know the maemo stack depends heavily on the GNOME components. Nokia has been supporting many GNOME projects and the GNOME ecosystem itself (Foundation and some companies) both with resources, public backing and code. There are no changes in these relationships and, in fact, within the context of evolution of the maemo platform the trend is to push more innovation through these channels and to strengthen the collaboration with the community upstream.

On the mid term… well, nobody knows. What follows are my thoughts today.

Looking the Nokia/Trolltech move from a KDE vs GNOME perspective would be a mistake. Looking at my collection of GNOME t-shirts I’m also tempted in taking this situation from a football fan point of view, but things are much more serious than that. There are many actors and software components in this Middle Earth of mobile platforms where maemo lives. The potential combinations are many and everybody is looking for the right one. The competition is fierce, specially when it comes to the mobile desktop. What if you need the best of both platforms to succeed with a proposal based on Linux & open source?

Qt is one piece of the KDE project, as GTK+ is one piece of the GNOME platform, but there is a lot more inside both projects, and even more elsewhere in the open source community. Many GNOME components present in the maemo platform (some of them also part of the Freedesktop.org initiative) are top class and Nokia keeps contributing to them. The Trolltech acquisition plans don’t affect these components in any way, not even in the mid term.

GTK+, Qt and related UI toolkits are definitely in the hot spot, receiving from many directions a big pressure to push the next mobile user interfaces. Nokia invests in GTK+ development for maemo and the Trolltech acquisition implies that Nokia plans to invest more in Qt development. This shows to me a clearer commitment to the open source game. Additionally, both investments benefit GNOME, KDE and the free desktop development in general, mobile or not. My conclusion: an interesting move.

If you still don’t get why Nokia wants to acquire Trolltech, please continue reading.

A first advice to any free software lover willing to understand: get to know what are the main businesses of Nokia and Trolltech nowadays. Yes, Nokia sells phones and Nokia has a Linux & GTK+ based platform called maemo for the not-a-phone Internet tablets. And yes, Trolltech supports the development of KDE. But both do a lot more, and their core business strategies have other key elements.

Trolltech develops Qt, a cross-platform application development framework that powers KDE and is also licensed to many commercial software projects. Nokia pushes the Symbian OS with several own platforms on top like S60, <edited>plus S40 running on top of its own Nokia developed OS</edited>, plus several non-mobile applications like Nokia PC Suite (developed with Qt, by the way). Trolltech’s toolkit and its C++ native language (which is native in Symbian as well) fit very well in Nokia’s short term strategy to improve cross-compatibility between the Symbian platforms. If making a good use of the Qt library helps having in maemo some of the cool stuff available in S60, all the better then.

This is the main reason why Nokia wants to acquire Trolltech. There are other interesting elements in the table like the Linux & open source skills but none of them would push such move alone. Personally, I wish getting Trolltech’s intelligence in house will help in other fronts as well, remarkably adding weight to the open source & community involvement agendas many of us are pushing internally. Putting Qt’s cross-platform capabilities to work on the PC side would be also nice, getting better support for Mac & Linux users.

All in all a good move if you, like me, think that a company like Nokia can have an important role pushing Linux & open source to the real mainstream. Even if it takes a while.

The N810 discounts for maemo contributors will be ready to be used in the online Nokia shops taking part of this program… next week. I was reluctant to give any date when I mentioned ‘around 15/dec’ and I’m still reluctant to give any exact day of next week since the factors are many and at maemo we don’t control any of them.

The unrelated good thing about this delay is that we have found extra time to agree the inclusion of Nokia Canada in the program. Contributors living in Canada will be able to get their discounted devices without international hassle, no matter what shop they selected when applying.

Instructions and codes for everybody next week.

Thanks to Murray, Jeff and others we are seeing now explicitely that critique and self-critique is not necessarely easy in open environments populated by volunteering freedom lovers. You think you are in an open environment where everybody can speak out, until you try to challenge the boundaries. Starting with yourself and your inner boundaries.

Are you telling everything you would like to tell? I certainly don’t. Shyness, respect, busy time, evaluation of potential reactions, lack of better alternatives… there are many reasons to freely decide not to be totally open about something / someone.

Are you being self-critique, even to yourself? That’s even more difficult to know. I think I am, and for instance this is why I decided not to run for re-election. I could be wrong, though. Many times someone told me something about me that I had been overlooking / ignoring / avoiding. Self-critique is a tough exercise, easier once you start though.

But what is relevant to the GNOME Foundation and the elections: we are not prepared to critique and self-critique. Board members leave a mandate without telling what went right and what went wrong, who did better and who did worse. We are volunteers and we respect each other: why getting into these potential personal troubles. There is not a mechanism for evaluation or even self evaluation, besides you being free to speak out or shut up.

Due to the function of the board, the critique is not so much about politics (opinions about topics) than about efficiency (ability to administer stuff individually and in a team). In this sense the opinions of those working regularly with the candidates are useful to figure out who to vote. Getting the positive opinions help, but getting also the hard critique would help more.

Political opposition in democratic systems help the citizenship to figure out what is really going on. When someone presents explicit opposition he is helping our democratic process, no matter how accurate his arguments are, no matter how much you agree or disagree about them. Speak out, listen, discuss, vote: these are the basis of democracy (and consensus).