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Nokia To Open Source Devs: 'We Need Closed'

Who gets to tell the open source world it needs to learn to play by proprietary rules? Nokia, evidently. When VP of software Dr. Ari Jaaksi spoke at the Handsets World conference earlier this week, he stated that open source developers needed to be "educated" in how the (very closed) mobile telecom industry works. Touchy words, but not wholly foolish ones.

As reported in BusinessWeek, here are some more of Jaaksi's statements:

Why do we need closed vehicles? We do ... Some of these things [DRM, etc.] harm the industry but they're here ... These are touchy, emotional issues but this dialogue is very much needed. As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round, too.

The bad news is that he's probably right. The mobile-phone industry hasn't seen any pressing need to change its business model -- not when you have stuff like the iPhone selling like hotcakes.  Open devices like the OpenMoko are little more than curiosities for the kernel-hacker set -- at least, so far -- and open innovations like Android are still a ways from actually hitting the marketplace, let alone proving how successful they can be.

A lot of this comes down to perceptions. Most people have no overriding need for a free-as-in-speech phone, pun not intended, because the locked-up versions give them most everything they could want. The few that do want something more open -- or that want to build and sell something more open -- are a minority.

The good news is that those few also are vociferous, and are starting to influence the thinking of the industry as a whole. But for now, Dr. Jaaksi is more right than wrong: the industry they're in, as it stands, is more closed than open, and the work they do and the tools they use will reflect that.

A side note. I recently picked up a new phone from T-Mobile with a contract extension -- a Nokia, no less, with Bluetooth and music-player functions and a host of other goodies. Sure, it would be great if I could tinker with some of that stuff. But not being able to do so, given how much else I got (and at the price I got it for), was no deal-breaker. Not yet.

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