[Duplicity-talk] Re: The company that wants to contribute

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 at 10:24:48AM -0500, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> > You can ask about Nokia's behavior in other community projects around
> > GNOME, freedesktop.org, WebKit, Mozilla, Xorg, Linux Kernel... and now
> > KDE after the Trolltech acquisition. They tend to have good opinions for
> > what I can tell.
> 
> Since you suggested it??? I can speak up with a view from another project:
> 
> Nokia's patent FUD and promotion of patent encumbered media codecs to
> the W3C has been incredibly harmful to the adoption of free formats on
> the web. 
> [http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/12/nokia-wants-w3c-to-remove-out-ogg-from-upcoming-html5-standard.ars]
>  (although, fortunately, at least Mozilla has apparently determined
> that Nokia's sabre rattling is without merit)
> 
> This activity is consistent with Nokia's long term advocacy for
> software patents in Europe:
> http://eupat.ffii.org/gasnu/nokia/index.en.html

Thanks for mentioning this. I had the same thing in mind when I read
those lines, I just couldn't remember what the details were.

I'm a Nokia mobile phone user for a long time -- my first mobile phone
was a Nokia 6130. Seeing Nokia being involved in OSS like Maemo or
opening existing software like Symbian makes the company quite
sympathic.

But things like fighting for software patents or the the closing of
Nokia's German factories makes me not really trusting their company
politics. So currently I'm feeling quite uncomfortable about things
like this GPLv2 vs GPLv3 issue or the Trolltech acquisition.

So I would also recommend to Ken to ask others, who know the subject
better, for help. E.g. the FSF can offer the European Legal Network
and the Software Freedom Law Center which both should be familiar with
such issues:

+ http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/ftf/network.en.html
+ http://www.softwarefreedom.org/

                Regards, Axel
-- 
Axel Beckert - address@hidden, address@hidden - http://noone.org/abe/