On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 4:44 PM,  <[email protected]> wrote:
> As you have seen how much Nokia has invested to Open Source, i think that
> management has seen business reason.

It's great to hear that Nokia management is supporting FOSS because
they've seen the economic benefit to their company. Many devs would
like to see more FOSS on phones, and having Nokia and Intel be
supportive of this effort is a great boon!

> I think that it is good thing to both of Nokia and Intel as many as possible 
> copies MeeGo.

I agree.

> I was discussing about 3rd party components like OpenGL-ES drivers.
> I don't know their reasons to keep drivers closed...

It's encouraging that people internal to Nokia are questioning the use
of closed-source drivers in the phone hardware. Replacing
closed-source drivers with open drivers would mean that there could
actually be a phone running on FOSS alone.

> ...i think that you
> should ask [why the drivers are closed] from them.
>

Oh yes. And I believe that several people have already tried to ask
them. Many developers are happy to ask the device manufacturer
themselves, but having some support from Nokia or from Nokia
developers could be very helpful in convincing the device
manufacturers to open their drivers.

>>"MeeGo is free. Code will be available for everybody under proper open
>>source licenses. No strings attached other than making your
>>contributions also free. The development and integration will be open,
>>too. Everybody can invest in MeeGo and participate. It is a genuine
>>open source project. Free for everybody to participate, contribute,
>>and enjoy. Free. No papers to sign. Just show up!"
>>
>>"The development and integration will be open, too."
>
> I agree 100% with this

Marvelous!

>>Ok. How can we assume an "open" development and integration with
>>non-open components?
>
> I would like see 100% open world

A lot of developers (and users) share this vision with you. If those
of us supportive of a 100% open environment work together, I believe
that we can make quite a lot of progress on freeing the entire
software running on Meego devices.

> but i don't have force to force everyone
> to release everything as Open Source.

It's a common sentiment... :-)

The neat thing is that although you might not feel like you have
enough pull to encourage a vendor to release their drivers under open
licenses, you're not the only one here. By pooling our resources and
tackling this problem as an entire open community, it will be much
easier.

> The fact is that some silicon vendors
> have only closed GPU drivers.

But some vendors *do* have open GPU drivers, and that's something we
can definitely explore.

> Nokia and Intel
> are big companies that have lot of power equals money but is it wise
> to use it just by buying all silocon IP vendors that have closed drivers to
> release drivers as open source ?

...maybe just buy up one or two vendors? :-)

All joking aside, I agree that there are vendors out there whose
drivers are non-free, but I think that this is definitely a problem
that can be side-stepped. When Nokia builds the successor to the n900,
what if you give preference to components with FOSS drivers?

If you approach a vendor and say "we'll use your _____ chip" in the
n920 (or whatever it'll be named) as long as you can provide a FOSS
driver for it," then I think you'll see vendors stepping up and
freeing their driver code in order to win the contract.

> Nokia and Inten can only release their own code,

Nokia & Intel releasing their own code under FOSS licenses is a great
place to start.

> they don't have unlimited
> power ( == money ) to release all 3rd sw as open source.

Indeed. That's why I suggest using leverage whenever possible :-)

>
> Kate

Thanks for your comments, Kate! It's great to hear people inside Nokia
supportive of a 100% FOSS Meego phone.

--Robinson
_______________________________________________
MeeGo-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev

Reply via email to