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A much more open Nokia?

Posted Thu, 09/18/2008 - 10:04 by jamiebennett

The Maemo developer session at OSiM 2008 served to show Nokia's stance on the future of openness on the internet tablets. They have signalled their intentions by today open sourcing many components that were once closed including the wifi and low level hardware monitoring drivers.

Nokia often quote the 80%/20% line; "In Diablo, 80% of the platform is currently open". Looking forward to Fremantle, this percentage is set to increase much more. Where closed applications were used, there is an increasing desire to use more open versions. Among the highlights are:

  • Meta data logging is set to be done by the open source Meta Tracker
  • Sound will be handled by Pulse Audio
  • uPnP will be handled gUPnP

    More is planned, watch this space.

    • Comments

    Yeah, Open Nokia? i really

    by Anonymous - 09/29/2008 - 15:34

    Yeah, Open Nokia? i really doub't about it. I have a Nokia N95 8GB and its really difficult to hack, nokia's policies had changed recently and i better dont start with this...

    Nokia's Symbian OS based

    by jamiebennett - 09/29/2008 - 18:24

    Nokia's Symbian OS based platform is another subject entirely but they have promised to start opening that too, see for instance http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/06/nokia_takes_in...

    The Maemo platform is, by Nokia's admission, about 20% closed source. They have already opened up part of that 20% with the source release of the wifi driver and more is planned for the future.

    I think we are seeing a gradual opening up of Nokia's software but if you compare it to other companies in the same space, Nokia is actually pioneering openness.