An interesting article on LWN about the “WONTFIX. No fixes to N770 anymore.” dispute and Nokia’s closed / open source dilemma:
Two examples of abandoned hardware (subscription required, non-subscribers have to wait a week.)
“It’s tempting to say that, since the 770 is a Linux-based device, the community should be able to support it into the future. As long as people care about the platform, it should continue to work. The problem is that the 770 contains a fair amount of non-free software at all levels. [..]“
“That will severely limit the degree to which the community can support the platform; it’s a slow death sentence for the 770 tablet. [..]“
“There are hints that more components will be opened in the future as well, but no promises. The end result is that the 770 will, for many users, hit the end of its useful life much sooner than it should have, and that the N800, while hopefully lasting longer, may well encounter similar issues. This state of affairs is unfortunate, it makes a nice piece of hardware less valuable than it really should be.”
It’s a chicken and egg problem, though. Developers and users claim that they would like to work on the 770 sources to extend the hardware’s usefulness beyond Nokia’s support.
But do they? Nokia counters that even those driver sources they did release haven’t found much response from outside developers.
In the meantime, users enjoy insulting Ari Jaaksi in his blog because of this issue. Yeah, I’m sure that will help the community making friends at Nokia…
Well, open source doesn’t work like this, does it?
Open source is a promise that you will always be able, even if mostly unwilling, to fix the glitches that might appear. It is in no way a commitment from me, a developer, that I will work on it now.
I bought my 770 couple of weeks before 800 was announced. I don’t regret it, but I can’t say I expected it to become an unsupported gadget some 3 months later. Mind you, you can still buy 770, which makes the whole thing even more absurd.
What I did expect was that a newer tablet would eventually appear and that most development would move there. But I also expected that bugs will get fixed at least for half a year after Nokia stopped shipping 770.
I fail to see the insults at Ari Jaaksi’s blog. Harsh criticism, yes, complains about being dropped after just over a year, too. Questioning his credibility after this issue too. But no insults (unless you consider that insulting).
I got my N770 on 2007/1/4, just four days before N800 was released. Fortunately, I was able to return it and buy a N800. What would my opinion be if I had had to stick with the N770 and then found this? Yes, you may guess I would be mighty pissed about it. Not enough to insult Nokia developers, but enough to recommend people to _not_ buy it. Hell, even Nokia mobiles have longer support periods. This is certainly a bad move.
I do not mind … comes with the job
Well, as a developer myself I’d be quite reluctant to invest time and effort into a platform that most likely will end up relatively useless because some fundamental parts are closed.