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0 pointspavlov16y ago0 comments

Sorry, but that's just nonsense. In the last three years, Nokia has:

* Acquired Trolltech, makers of the Qt toolkit (basis of KDE), changed Qt's licensing to the more flexible LGPL, and opened up the Qt development model to open source contributions.

* Acquired Symbian, the world's most widely distributed smartphone OS, then open-sourced the whole thing and turned it over to a non-profit foundation.

* Released several versions of their Maemo mobile Linux distribution on devices like N810 and N900.

* Fused Maemo with Intel's Moblin effort to create MeeGo, a unified mobile Linux for netbooks, smartphones and other mobile applications.

Where's the ambivalence?

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ig116y ago

My understanding at the time they open sourced it Symbian was a nightmare, the technical leadership was completely falling to pieces and a huge number of their developers were quitting. And when you're doing things like rolling your own STL implementation you can't just pick up random C++ devs to plug the gaps. Symbian was (still is?) dead in the water, open sourcing it was a last stab at survival.

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