Will Nokia Ever Realize Open Source Is Not a Panacea?

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/08/18/open-source-not-panacea.html

I was pretty sure there was something wrong with the whole thing in
fall of 2009, when they first asked me. A Nokia employee contacted me
to ask if I’d be willing to be a director of
the Symbian
Foundation (or so I thought that’s what they were asking —
read on). I wrote them a thoughtful response explaining my then-current
concerns about
Symbian:

  • the poor choice of
    the Eclipse Public
    License     for the eventual code,
  • the fact that Symbian couldn’t be built in any software freedom
    system environment, and
  • that the Symbian source code that had been released thus far didn’t
    actually run on any existing phones.

I nevertheless offered to serve as a director for one year, and I would
resign at that point if the problems that I’d listed weren’t
resolved.

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I figured that was quite a laundry list. I also figured that they
probably wouldn’t be interested anyway once they saw my list.
Amusingly, they still were. But then, I realized what was really going
on.

In response to my laundry list, I got back a rather disturbing response
that showed a confusion in my understanding. I wasn’t being invited to
join the board of the Symbian Foundation. They had asked me instead to
serve as a Director of a small USA entity (that
they heralded
as Symbian DevCo) that would then be permitted one Representative of
the Symbian Foundation itself, which was, in turn, a trade association
controlled by dozens of proprietary software companies.

In fact, this Nokia employee said that they planned to channel all
individual developers toward this Symbian DevCo in the USA,
and that would be the only voice these developers would have in
the direction of Symbian. It would be one tiny voice against dozens of
proprietary software company who controlled the real Symbian Foundation,
a trade association.

Anyone who has worked in the non-profit sector, or even contributed to
any real software freedom project can see what’s deeply wrong
there. However, my response wasn’t to refuse. I wrote back and said
clearly why this was failing completely to create a software freedom
community that could survive vibrantly. I pointed out the way the Linux
community was structured: whereby the Linux Foundation is a trade
association for companies — and, while they do fund Linus’ salary,
they don’t control his or any other activities of developers.
Meanwhile, the individual Linux developers have all the real authority:
from community structure, to licensing, to holding copyrights, to
technical decision-making. I pointed out if they wanted Symbian to
succeed, they should emulate Linux as much as they could. I suggested
Nokia immediately change the whole structure to have developers in
charge of the project, and have a path for Symbian DevCo to ultimately
be the primary organization in charge of the codebase, while Symbian
Foundation could remain the trade association, roughly akin to the Linux
Foundation. I offered to help them do that.

You might guess that I never got a reply to that email. It was thus no
surprise to me in the least what happened to Symbian after that:

So, within 17 months of Symbian Foundation’s inquiry to ask me to help
run Symbian DevCo, the (Open Source) Symbian project was
canceled entirely, the codebase was now again proprietary (with
a few of the old
codedumps floating around on other sites),
and the Symbian Foundation
consists only of a single webpage filled with double-speak.

Of course, even if Nokia had tried its hardest to build an actual
software freedom community, Symbian still had a good chance of
failing, as I
pointed out in March 2010. But, if Nokia had actually tried to
release control and let developers have some authority, Symbian might
have had a fighting chance as Free Software. As it turned out, Nokia
threw some code over the wall, gave all the power to decide what happens
to a bunch of proprietary software companies, and then hung it all out
to dry. It’s a shining example of how to liberate software in a way
that will guarantee its deprecation in short order.

Of course, we now know that during all this time, Nokia was busy
preparing a backroom deal that would end its
always-burgeoning-but-never-complete affiliation with software freedom
by making a deal with Microsoft to control the future of Nokia. It’s a
foolish decision for software freedom; whether it’s a good business
decision surely isn’t for me to judge. (After all, I haven’t worked in
the for-profit sector for fifteen years for a reason.)

It’s true that I’ve always given a hard time to Maemo (and to MeeGo as
well). Those involved from inside Nokia spent the last six months
telling me that MeeGo is run by completely different people at Nokia,
and Nokia
did recently launch yet another MeeGo based product. I’ve meanwhile
gotten the impression that Nokia is one of those companies whose
executives are more like wealthy Romans who like to pit their champions
against each other in the arena to see who wins; Nokia’s various
divisions appear to be in constant competition with each other. I
imagine someone running the place has read too much Ayn Rand.

Of course, it now seems that MeeGo hasn’t, in Nokia’s view,
“survived as the fittest”.
I learned today (thanks
to jwildeboer) that,
In
Elop’s words, there is no returning to MeeGo, even if the N9 turns out
to be a hit. Nokia’s commitment to Maemo/MeeGo, while it did last
at least four years or so, is now gone too, as they begin their march to
Microsoft’s funeral dirge. Yet another FLOSS project Nokia got serious
about, coordinated poorly, and yet ultimately gave up.

Upon considering Nokia’s bad trajectory, it led me to think about how
Open Source companies tend to succeed. I’ve noticed something
interesting, which I’ve confirmed by talking to a lot of employees of
successful Open Source companies. The successful ones — those
that get something useful done for software freedom while also making
some cash (i.e., the true promise of Open Source) — let the
developers run the software projects themselves. Such
companies don’t relegate the developers into a small
non-profit that has to lobby dozens of proprietary software companies to
actually make an impact. They
don’t throw code over the wall — rather, they
fund developers who make their own decisions about what to do in the
software. Ultimately, smart Open Source companies treat software
freedom development like R&D should be treated: fund it and see what
comes out and try to build a business model after something’s already
working. Companies like Nokia, by contrast, constantly put their carts
in front of all the horses and wonder why those horses whinny loudly at
them but don’t write any code.

Open Source slowly became a fad during the DotCom era, and it strangely
remains such. A lot of companies follow fads, particularly when they
can’t figure what else to do. The fad becomes a quick-fix solution. Of
course, for those of us that started as volunteers and enthusiasts in
1991 or earlier, software freedom isn’t some new attraction at
P. T. Barnum’s circus. It’s a community where we belong and collaborate
to improve society. Companies are welcomed to join us for the ride, but
only if they put developers and users in charge.

Meanwhile, my personal postscript to my old conversation with Nokia
arrived in my inbox late in May 2011. I received a extremely vague email
from a lawyer at Nokia. She wanted really badly to figure out how to
quickly dump some software project — and she wouldn’t tell me what
it was — into the Software Freedom Conservancy. Of course, I’m
sure this lawyer knows nothing about the history of the Symbian project
wooing me for directorship of Symbian DevCo and all the other history of
why “throwing code over the wall” into a non-profit is
rarely known to work, particularly for Nokia. I sent her a response
explaining all the problems with her request, and, true to Nokia’s
style, she didn’t even bother to respond to me thanking me for my
time.

I can’t wait to see what project Nokia dumps over the wall next, and
then, in another 17 months (or if they really want to lead us
on, four years), decides to proprietarize or abandon it because, they’ll
say, this open-sourcing thing just doesn’t work. Yet, so many
companies make money with it. The short answer is: Nokia,
you keep doing it wrong!

Update (2011-08-24):
Boudewijn
Rempt argued another side of this question.
He says
the Calligra suite is a counterexample of Nokia getting a FLOSS project
right. I don’t know enough about Calligra to agree or disagree.