monetary thinking

My conclusion in a nutshell: these things would not happen this way if the community at large would know about Nokia’s open source contributions.

– Quim about Nokia’s PR desaster

I’ve long since thought that this line of thinking, that apparently quite a few companies believe in, is wrong: “Hey, we have contributed lots of money to your cause, now we must have something to say!” I’m sorry, but that is wrong. There’s a reason why it’s called the open source community, not the open source stock exchange.

How much you have to say depends entirely on how much respect you have with your peers. And of course, you can be respected differently depending on topic. There’s a reason why some people are role models when it comes to technical opinion, but not when it comes to licensing questions. And for others this is different again.

So to wrap it up: If Nokia comes along and tells that they have contributed lots of code, I might expect Nokia to have technical know-how. If it also tells me I need to accept closed source, I will not trust it with leadership. So Nokia, I’ll be very happy to work with your engineers.

Syndicated 2008-06-18 16:19:43 from Swfblag