David Coursey over at PC World has written of the recently revealed and much hyped Nokia N900 that he “[would like] to see … Nokia licensing Palm’s webOS, used on the Pre” for the device. I couldn’t disagree more.
While Palm’s WebOS is a promising and mature platform already familiar to Pre owners, Nokia’s N900 is slated to use the Maemo platform, used insofar on the lacklustre N770, N800 and N810 Internet tablets. Maemo 5, the new revision set to ship with the N900, is looking to be equivalent to WebOS and much more polished than its older brothers on the early N-series. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference at all between Maemo and WebOS, except for one small but powerfully important characteristic: the libre.
For some like myself, it’s about free culture. It’s about free speech versus free beer; gratis versus libre. Palm’s WebOS may not cost you anything, but it’s licensed to you. You are not free to modify the device as you might your own house or your own car. You are not allowed to use the device to perform reasonable actions which the network carriers or phone makers may not want you to perform, such as revolutionary and inevitable features like streaming television or foregoing the ancient payment methods utilized by network carriers and instead employing VoIP solutions to get your phone calls made.
The free software movement and the free culture movement, though not large, look upon actions like this with immense gratuity, and indeed at least for some, that will be the deciding factor. It is not to say that having a truly open operating system matters on a smartphone: the average person doesn’t even know what an operating system is, but certainly the average person will benefit from such openness, in the same way we attempt to keep our markets reasonably open, or our various standards reasonably open.
Tagged: android, FOSS, free software, maemo, n900, nokia, palm, pre, smartphones, software, Technology
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3 Comments
Thank you nokia for finaly ripping some of the drakonian controls away from cell provides. Now if only I could justify the $700 for the phone when I can’t even afford the local cell providers’ data prices
Why put Android in the heading, but say nothing about it in the article? Android has the libre too, as you put it.
Oops! David Coursey’s quote included both WebOS and Android and I meant to include them both in the libre argument.
Please correct me if I’m wrong but last I heard, it was difficult to do various free actions with Android, such as acquire root, recompile the kernel, install sshd. Again, please correct me, but I believe Android is actively set up to prevent such things, not wholly unlike the iPhone OS.