Nokia says Open Source developers need a business lesson

by: admin Thursday, June 12th, 2008

One of the tricky aspects of developing open source software has always been the monetisation of it. It goes against against the ethos of open source and the licensing agreement, which in general says that code has to be made re-available to the open source community if an application/development is built using open source.Dr Ari Jaaksi, Nokia’s vice president of software and head of the Finnish handset manufacturer’s open-source operations told delegates at the Handsets World Conference in Berlin that the open-source community needed to be ‘educated’ in the way the mobile industry currently works, because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models.

Jaaksi said: “We want to educate open-source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models.”
“These are touchy, emotional issues, but this dialogue is very much needed. As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too.” he added.

In a week where Nokia finally got the go ahead to acquire Trolltech many industry speculators have commented that they thought Nokia’s reasons for the purchase of Trolltech maybe for other purposes and not a way to move into the applications market as Nokia has stated. Whatever the real reasoning it seems that Linux based operating systems feature strongly on the horizon with Android, LiMo and Open Source Development. Jasski though still believes that Symbian, who Nokia own a major share of, is the “best platform on which to create smartphones” and still will be “in years to come.”

You can find the original story here on Zdnet.