Another case of open source junk? Nokia

Disclaimer: I haven't examined the source code, used the web browser for the S60 nor have I had any contact with members of the S60 development team. This post is not a criticism of the Nokia or the S60 browser, it is simply a personal inquiry.

Recently Nokia released the source code for their S60 web browser for mobile phones, which I actually found to be an interesting choice on their part seeing how there hasn't been much activity in the client/device side open source mobile arena. I think the open source community needs more involvement from vendors like Nokia, ones that have the experience and resources to drive involvement.

However, I've come to notice the tendency of large vendors (not Nokia in particular but others) to seemingly open source code for the sake of doing so instead of for the sake of building a strong project and community. It's very hard for me to imagine that the Eclipse model of building a strong open source community with corporate involvement can't be duplicated. IBM is an outstanding company but it doesn't hold a monopoly on understanding how to handle the intricacies of open source communities. I'm also not of the opinion that IBM is the only global company that can benefit from involvement in open source. As a matter of fact, other companies probably have more to gain from it, considering IBM's considerable experience, brand strength and size.

In reality, the lack of success by companies who open source code probably has more to do with the value of the code that they release into the public domain. There are very few reasons left that a decent product released under a likewise decent license coupled with the backing of a company can't duplicate the success of other organically constructed communities like MySQL, JBoss, or Funambol.

The value of enabling the growth of a community around a project has been proven sufficiently to warrant the risk releasing code as open source. I'm not suggesting that proprietary companies should dump their business model and become open source companies in full, nor do I think the answer lies in open sourcing flagship (see: cash cow) products. But I also know that it might be helpful to traditional software companies if they more seriously considered open source as a way of helping their own bottom line. There are a number of options that can be explored...look at what SAP did with MaxDB and how they turned it over to MySQL.

Maybe as open source receives garners more general acceptance there will be more involvement by companies in terms of releasing good code bases, instead of dead end, failed internal projects and concepts. A great deal of this depends on how well open source companies can establish a business model for consistently generating revenue.

One thing is sure as the number of open source projects increases, it won't be an option to just throw code out there just to "look current", it will take good offerings to generate involvement and eventually even a small amount of publicity.