(Some?) 3G support for Linux from Nokia - relevant for future models?

[Mikko Rauhala]

to, 2008-09-18 kello 05:45 +1000, Lorn Potter kirjoitti:
> Mikko Rauhala wrote:
> > Personally I'll be loathe to buy Nokia products anyway, they're just way
> > too inconsistent with their policies and have no commitment to free
> > software whatsoever.
> 
> I would beg to differ. Trolltech is now part of Nokia, Qt and Qtopia 
> certainly are open source and I can tell you for certain, we are 
> committed to keeping them open source.

Sure Nokia has some products which happen to be free software. That
doesn't make them committed to free software, what with being eg.
hostile to free formats, a strong opponent of independent software
development in general through their patent lobby, very much clueless in
top level press comments about these subjects, and in general not being
very consistent in what they're up to in this area.

> Maemo is quite good. That is pure Nokia. Qt and Qtopia are good, that is 
> now from Nokia...

The tablet OS has significant proprietary portions, both third party and
in-house - the latter having insiders commenting that it's difficult
(when at all possible) to get the go-ahead to free the code properly.
Not to mention the target hardware platform pretty much requires binary
blob kernel code and such (last I checked anyway).

Not meaning to start a Nokia flamefest here, it was originally just a
side comment, but since we have a (paid) on-list representative here,
apparently a reminder of the other side of the coin is in order.

-- 
Mikko Rauhala   - mjr at iki.fi     - <URL:http://www.iki.fi/mjr/>
Transhumanist   - WTA member     - <URL:http://www.transhumanism.org/>
Singularitarian - SIAI supporter - <URL:http://www.singinst.org/>