PCMag's Sascha Segan recently aired his opinion on why open-source solutions will not succeed in the U.S. Of course, this is the same blogger that spent a lot of energy telling people why U.S. carriers would never pick up Android phones, only to be forced looking at Android now climbing the ladder with help from a gigantic Verizon Wireless ad budget.
In his most recent column, Sascha Segan now says that Android is an exception, because its third-party apps are running in a Java-based Virtual Runtime Engine. If you believe hard enough, there's always an outcome in your favor, or what? Sadly, for Sascha Segan, he uses the Maemo-powered Nokia N900 to prove his point.
The first thing Nokia did when they decided that they wanted to work with the Maemo community to offer the operating system, was to tie up the loose ends that would not suit a commercial playground in the long run. Additionally, Nokia's own Canola Media Player as well as Mozilla's Fennec for instance, has got components licensed under LGPL. In other words, commercial app developers, manufacturers and carriers can integrate solutions in Maemo under LGPL if they want more control over their code.
To us, it seems like Sascha Segan confuses openness and open-source when trying to prove his points. There's a big difference, and no carrier (or other mobile industry player) will ever use open-source solutions alone as a serious way to generate revenue, simply because it's not possible.
Android is currently the best example of how it's all done. Google's own apps are not open-source, but they promote openness. The point here is that it's not one large commercial player alone that should decide how the playground should look like, but several commercial players in combination. These commercial players then distribute parts of their work under an open-source license, subsequently making it easier for even more players to contribute to openness. Apple distributes the Webkit engine under an open-source license for instance, but that doesn't make a Webkit-based browser open-source.
In the end, an entire new ecosystem emerges to make the whole effort worthwhile commercially, which U.S. carriers will benefit from with less effort than ever before. In that regard, we find it hard to believe that Sascha Segan has any clue about what he's talking about in this column.
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