Dave Neary wrote:
Hi,
Lorn Potter wrote:
If you look at the development, both Nokia and Openmoko 'runs the show'
and has the last say on their respective platforms, not the community.
It is perfectly reasonable to me that Nokia and FIC get to decide the
software that's installed on their hardware. But that doesn't take away
from the fact that they have chosen free software as the basis for their
system. Nokia haven't tried, for example, to take over GTK+ development
and add lots of Maemo-relevant patches to the core GTK+ releases
(although many of those patches probably should be mainlined). I'm sure
that they could, if they chose to.
Instead they're working with the upstream community and maintaining
patches downstream for their hardware, while trying their best to get as
many as possible of those patches back upstream for community approval.
Isn't that a model of collaboration worth encouraging?
Free software is worth encouraging. Status quo closed source is not.
Compare to Qtopia, Trolltech decides the roadmap for the software, and
the community is welcome to participate (after signing a copyright
assignment) in so far as they agree with that roadmap.
Actually, the community (the free software community, our customers and
the market in which it is sold) decides Qtopia's roadmap.
Contributing code to Qtopia is really no different than contributing
code to FSF/GNU.
Equating the FSF, a non-profit which guarantees that software assigned
to it will remain Free Software ad infinitum with Trolltech, a company
who wants to make money off dual licencing by releasing my work under a
commercial licence to those who don't like the GPL... that's pretty funny.
Trolltech GPL's most of the code it develops, which guarantees that
software will remain free ad infinitum. So ya, equating the copyright
assignment for both FSF and Trolltech is the same.
--
Lorn 'ljp' Potter
Software Engineer, Systems Group, MES, Trolltech
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