[Announce] Intel and Nokia announce open source telephony project (oFono)

[Lorn Potter]

Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
> (Private note: I have this strange sense of Deja Vu :-), although it's been a 
> long time since we had this argument :-)
> 
> On Tuesday 12 May 2009 02:56:12 Lorn Potter wrote:
>> Michael 'Mickey' Lauer wrote:
>>> Yeah,
>>>
>>> that's pretty sad. They should have picked FSO or even Pyneo or at least
>>> something that is already in development for quite a while. This way it
>>> looks like NIH syndrome.
>> kettle calling the pot black...
>> I always thought one of open source's strengths was choice.
> 
> What sounds like an asset is a liability thanks to fragmentation. I'd rather 
> chose among few great options than lots of medicre ones.
> 
>>> Until now, trying to co-work with these guys typically went like "yeah,
>>> you can take our APIs, if you want. No, we don't want to look at yours,
>>> thanks.".
>> This is partly due to the fact that they planned the roadmap forward in
>> years, not weeks or months, not to mention the waterfall development style
>> they are probably using.
>>
>> It might have been developed internally for quite some time before this.
> 
> Which doesn't make me more confident in their ability to shape the platform 
> APIs _together_ with the application developers as opposed to merely impose it 
> on them. If it continues to be like that, FSO has a bright life.
> 
>>> In contrast to that, FSO rather embraces application developer's
>>> requests.
>>>
>>> Lets see what happens this time.
>> You tell me, is Nokia opening up and really embracing open source?
>> http://qt.gitorious.org/qt
> 
> That's Qt and they have inherited this style from Trolltech.

But it isn't "Trolltech" that gave the "ok" for this to go ahead. Nokia had to sign off on it too.


> 
> The way Nokia has developed Maemo it was always about take it or leave it the 
> way it is. 

True. But Nokia is paranoid about patents and copyrights and licenses and such things. Which might
explain one reason why this has been true.

> 
> Open source does not necessarily mean an open development process, you should 
> know that better than me :)

I think that most open source projects have a rather closed development process.


-- 
Lorn 'ljp' Potter
Software Engineer, Qt Software R&D, Nokia Pty Ltd