Back from LinuxTag… with a ???? feeling
Following our Europe Open Source in mobile WIPjam tour, here's the first blog in a short series summarizing the tour.
Obviously one can wonder these days about the usefulness of blogging about an event when twitter offers you a better, more multilaterally objective opinion @ TwitterSearch ?
If you do not speak German? You could probably get all posts googletranslated and start wondering about what really happened and what the discussions were all about. And frankly looking at tweets like this one you would be led to believe that there were serious and interesting chats going on when it comes to openness in mobile: @taknil "Back from LinuxTag. This is where Apple is not an open wireless devices found. Did the Android phone is not won." (*)
Unfortunately this is entirely misleading and the debates around openness and mobile were rather scarce… or rather the open-sourceness spirit and mobile did struggle a bit to meet at the show (as a reminder LinuxTag is the largest open source show in Europe with 10,000 visitors this year).[once again you might need to googletranslate].
And I was going there full of hopes that finally openness would please the crowds… It was but not in the way I had expected… As we discovered during the WIPJam on openness in mobile organized with the support of Symbian Foundation.
Open-sourceness is obviously a given… And anyone not in this camp should be vilified… Except maybe if they're Apple. Looking at source code experts can comment extensively on the beauty of the Dalvik for Java developers, or the greatness of the Android security model (googletranslate again). And frankly open-sourceness seems to have gathered around Android… a large community of individuals willing to spend time, effort and their own money to bank on the future opportunity as we saw at the Android Stammtisch.
However open development is just not a crowd pleaser… The numerous tales of bug fixes on Android left unanswered (interesting to see though that most people I met tried) , and the lack of activities on the forums… None of these seem to be issues for developers… Except that is if you are genuinely trying to do a device and looking for a project where you can truly contribute.
So if we do not want openness to equal opensourness soon can we really limit it to opensourceness and exclude open development ?
We'll discuss this in our next post.
*) The translation from the post by a human being would rather sound like: "Back from LinuxTag. No open WLAN available on my iPhone. And I didn't win an Android device at the prize draw" … (sounds like a bad day to me)
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