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Nokia: How to Do Opensource Right

By Jay Savage | May 27, 2005

The [Nokia 770](http://www.nokia.com/770) has gotten a lot of press in the last couple of days, but it deserves a little more. Nokia has always been hacker and homebrew friendly. Most of their consumer devices use [Symbian](http://www.symbian.com/), which provides good docs and runs a fairly useful developer site, and this attitute of openess is a large part of what has made so many Mac users–as well as Linux and other *nix users–loyal Nokia customers. The Symbian docs are what enable enable projects like [The Missing Sync](http://www.markspace.com/), and symbian integration with Konact, Evolution, etc. This time, though, Nokia has gone a step further. The 770 will not run Symbian, but instead, a Nokia OS named Internet Tablet 2005, a custom Debain distro based on the 2.6 (currently 2.6.11) kernel.

I know what you’re thinking: we’ve heard this before; and Zaurus was a miserable failure. Where Nokia really shines, though, is with [Maemo](http://www.maemo.org), the 770 SDK and reference platform. Maemo is a Linux (GTK)-based SDK that provides bindings for 770 as well as a virtual machine for testing. This means that anyone can develop for the 770 (and IT2005 products to come) without investing in hardware for testing. It also means that programmers can bring familiar GTK techniques to the IT2005 table, and presumably that applications can be written in any language with GTK bindings and a Linux-based ARM compiler or interpreter. Usually as a developer you get either a virtual machine that speaks a non-standard dialect, or more often, an SDK that runs on the platform itself, which requires the expense of machine to test on. Maemo is a first here, at least when it comes to supporting opensource projects. Better still, maemo.org provides extensive docs including a fairly well-put-together reference manual and a how-to specifically on porting GTK and Qt apps, featuring gaim as a test case. This is a fabulous resource.

It’s also a clever gimick: Nokia has announced an internet messaging client to be released in Q1 2006. The 770, though, is slated for Q3 2005, so if you want IM before that, you’re going to have to build gaim yourself (or download an rpm deb from somewhere), which should promote familiarity with maemo and the porting process, and spark some fairly rapid porting of critical and popular apps. If Maemo lives up to its potential, this has the potential to be the best example we’ve seen yet of a successful commercial/opensource venture.

I just wish PlamOne would manage the LifeDrive project this way. (via [darla mack](http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2005/05/nokia_nokia_lau.html))

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Topics: linux, opensource, tech |

2 Responses to “Nokia: How to Do Opensource Right”

  1. David Weinehall Says:
    July 1st, 2005 at 9:04 am

    Downloading an RPM from somewhere won’t help you too
    much, since the 770 is running Debian =) Downloading
    a .deb might, however…

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