Nokia Funding MinimoFriday June 18th, 2004CNET News.com is reporting that Nokia is funding Minimo. The Minimo project aims to build a version of Mozilla that can run on small devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. Nokia began funding development last year but has not yet shipped any Minimo-powered phones, with most of the company's lineup currently using Opera's smartphone browser. i wonder what excuse will we hear now for not knowing about this agreement? i'm not saying it's a bad agreement, only that i would expect an open source organization to be more, well, open. So you're saying the Mozilla FOundation should turn down all funding from groups that request confidentiality? Alex do you really call that confidentiality - when news.com writes an article about it? no, there should have been a press-announcement on the mozilla-site. nothing more. that's what i think we can expect from an open-source-foundation... if they really requested confidentiality, there wouldn't have been any news. Obviously it's not confidential any more - but if Mozilla makes an official statement then they would (I guess) be breaching their contract with Nokia. The only lawful thing for them to do would be to refuse to enter into an agreement which required confidentiality in the first place. It's just the political/financial games that corporations and the media play - you don't play have to play with them, but if you do then you have to accept their rules. And what is an "open source foundation"? The organisation isn't a computer program. It's the code is open source. It's quite possible to be a completely closed organisation and produce open source code. As organisations go, the Foundation isn't as closed as it could be; it's also not as open as it could be. It doesn't make any claims to be run openly, or run by the community/public - it's a private organisation run by a small group of people. well, than that's a different case, if it just should be confidential, though it doesn't seem so. an open-source-foundation, well, in my opinion mozilla is a foundation that JUST supports open-source-products. the only connection to closed source is the lgpl and probably mpl (i don't know what the mpl says). so, imho the foundation should be a good example and try to be as open as possible. it's different if a closed organisation produces open source code, because then it's very likely that they do closed source code too. but that shouldn't be a problem, shouldn't it? let's be happy that nokia is funding minimo, because i think that's one of mozilla's most important markets in the future. "in my opinion mozilla is a foundation that JUST supports open-source-products. the only connection to closed source is the lgpl and probably mpl" Don't forget all the meetings they have with potential vendors of proprietary Mozilla-based products. The licenses are designed to allow Mozilla technology to be used in proprietary products. The whole Mozilla project was started by and (initially) funded by Netscape, a vendor of proprietary, closed-source software. Alex "in my opinion mozilla is a foundation that JUST supports open-source-products." From the very beginning the Mozilla Organization was founded by Netscape with an explicit intention to foster open-source/commercial hybrids. Of course there's the obvious Netscape version of the browser suite, but from the beginning also commercial users of the "spidermonkey" javascript engine and users of the "NSS" crypto/SSL libraries such as Sun server products. Now that the Mozilla Foundation is independent of Netscape it's possible that they would change their philosophy, but it shouldn't surprise anyone if they haven't. Volunteers can keep the project moving forward but it takes cash to power the infrastructure that keeps it all together. The software licensing does not apply to everything to everything but only software, I don't see why MF should disclose every piece of information. As long as it keeps true to its status as a nonprofit.. This isn't really about 'full disclosure' from the mozilla group - its about a nice bit of publicity! Undoubtedly, now c|net have covered this it will be mirrored over the web, but if there had been a press release people might have started a bit earlier and further boosted interest in the project. Equally, they might have began talking about how a nice cash boosh from nokia proves further that Mozilla isn't an open-source failure (not that we thought that anyway). Good news, congrats to those responsible for this deal. ;-) Nokia are probably trying to pressure Opera by this move. From the design of Opera (on the PC platform) since version 3.2, I would be surprised to find anything that comes close. Minimo will have a long way to go. It is, however, a nice move at least for the Mozilla Foundation. I only hope that will not cause significant harm to decent software companies (as Opera). I would give several Internal organs for Moz on a Palm. The Tungsten T3 has 64 meg of RAM so surely it could run some verision of Moz or Firebird. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/screenshots.html Screenshots from the 0.1 version of Minimo on an iPAQ Yeah I saw this story, it's great news, but I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced by minimo. In particular, the idea of trying to produce a cut-down Mozilla that can run on small devices is great. But I'm not sure it will ever get really small; right now it only runs on pretty much the largest 'small devices'. Of course, small devices are getting larger in terms of memory etc. all the time, but will this really happen quickly enough for Minimo to get a hold? How does Minimo's footprint compare to handheld Opera? And their 'small device stylesheet' is sort of.. well... hrm. I don't think the concept really works. I think a simple throw-away-style button would probably do better; basically like toggling to a plain-text browser. Trying to keep some existing layout while throwing half of it away is basically not going to work. Of course I wish the project all the best. --quen |