Pity poor Dr. Ari Jaaksi from Nokia. He gave a talk at the Handsets World conference in Berlin on Tuesday, where according to ZDnet, he lectured Open Source Developers that they needed to learn why DRM and other closed technologies were necessary, because of business issues such as subsidized (device) business models. I suspect he wasn’t prepared for the reaction, which took the form of a major fuss on Slashdot, as well as some declarations from a few people on the maemo-users mailing lists that they would never buy another Nokia device. Dr Jaaski then posted today on his blog an entry entitled, “Some learning to do?”, where he stated that while Nokia needs to learn how the open source world works (not just licenses and legal issues, but also the spirit), that the open source world also needed to learn as well — about WHY things are the way they are. He ended the post with “I’m not a teacher, I’m a learner” — which is fair enough.
I actually think that Dr. Jaaksi is right; we all should be interested in learning, and having talked with a number of Nokia employees, I can testify that their hearts are very much in the right place, and there are some strong reasons regarding the demands of carriers, the subsidized business model of handsets in the US, the attitudes of suppliers for components in mobile devices, that very much tie their hands — as well the hands of every other handset company out there. Progress in this space will come slowly, and but I believe there is hope that in the long run things will get better.
However, at the same time, I would suggest to Dr. Jaaksi that it’s also important how to communicate with the open source community — or with any community that holds views sometimes with great passion. Many people do not react well to being told that they need to learn something — even if it is true that they do. Admitting that they need to learn is for some people tantamount to admitting ignorance, or even worse admitting stupidity, and so they are loath to do this. Telling them this just makes them defensive and angry.
My suggestion for how get people to learn without making them defensive is to use a modified Socratic method. It works especially well with the Open Source crowd, because many of them are engineers, and engineers are by nature problem solvers. So if you give them a problem to solve, they will go to work trying to find potential solutions, and thus start thinking and learning about the problem from a different point of view. Hence, a better approach is to give them a series of business constraints (time to market, the demands of carriers, the fact that most end users prefer to buy subsidized phones with 1-2 year lock-in contracts, the intransigence of suppliers, why a single company can’t afford to create their own chipsets from scratch and have to rely on companies like Broadcom, etc.) and then tell them — we’d love to delight our customers in any way we can, and clearly you are very passionate about DRM, open device drivers, and other OSS issues. We however have to create successful products and sell them at a price such that we don’t go out of business — can you help us work through all of these constraints? Let’s work together so we can make an open source mobile platform that meets the spirit as well as the legal requirements of the open source world!
Dr. Jaaksi and his team are struggling with a hard problem, and I am very sympathetic to their issues. And, they have to be commended for investing as much time and effort on the Maemo platform, as well as other Linux and Open Source platforms as they have to date. The strength of the Open Source community is that we work together to solve our mutual problems, while celebrating and giving permission to people to “scratch their own itches”. In order to do that, we need to learn how to better communicate with each other, and that is something that goes in both directions.
When I was at MIT as an undergraduate, far too many years ago than I care to admit, I took economics classes and Sloan School of Management classes (even though they were not necessary for a Computer Science degree) for that very reason. I encourage open source advocates to learn how to walk a mile or two in business people’s shoes, since if you want to influence them them to change in the ways that you desire, you need to know where they are coming from — just shouting and throwing rotten tomatoes generally won’t get you very far. On the flip side, people who are on the corporate side of the divide also need to understand that certain ways of engaging the community can be more productive than others. At the end of the day, hopefully we can all agree with Dr. Jaaksi that everyone will benefit if we all commit to learning from each other.
Update: I’ve fixed Dr. Jaaksi’s name so it is spelled correctly; my apologies for the error.
June 13th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Thanks for this balanced write-up and for pointing out something I think cannot be repeated often enough: “try to walk a mile in someone’s shoes”!
June 13th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
I actually wrote a long comment in this post explaining why DRM does not work in general and why DRM does not work in the context of FLOSS, but then i re-read the URL and understood who you are, and i knew in advance I would start a flame or maybe clean the dust out of the “why tivoization is wrong and the kernel should be gpl3″ flame. So i moved it to /dev/null
I believe that DRM and Linux are incompatible in nature and you can’t have both. And you can’t have the cake and eat it. Jaaksi is wrong about his perceptions about Free Software community. He has the right to use any technology he wants in his products (obeying the law/licenses, like everyone), but he has to understand that DRM, SIM-locks and Nokia position in favor of Software Patents goes against Free Software, it will always be.
So it is hard to me to be so kind as you are. His company pays man/hours in kernel/GTK/Mozilla/whatever development, but the guy in charge, Ari, just don’t get it, he says he is not ready to play by the rules, and ask us to move to him instead. That is close of what Darl McBride could have said and is not worth any respect.
June 14th, 2008 at 1:16 am
What a breath of fresh air! Thanks for injecting some common sense and reason into an otherwise (unnecessarily IMO) rancorous debate.
June 14th, 2008 at 2:16 am
I also want to thank you for the thoughtful comments. Having come from the open source community and now working at Nokia, it is often frustrating when new information from each side gets lost in the heat and emotion of the moment.
OSS is a major aspect of any modern system design. In the business environment, there are other stakeholders interests that we also need to accomodate: FCC regulation of public airwaves for the public good, Cellular carrier’s concerns about protecting their consumers from unpleasant experiences, Content owner’s concerns about paying artists and other creative people for their contributions.
Thanks again for advancing the dialog so that we can come to a better synthesis!
June 14th, 2008 at 9:46 am
I think you have it right, though I personally would be more bloody-minded in sticking to principles.
The market issues are there, but the way this was presented on Slashdot (including the direct quotes selected), he sounded majorly lacking in clue.
I think it’s telling that you specifically don’t mention DRM, because that’s the top hot-button issue on the Slashdot summary. Most of us are not purists; where necessary we would accept binary driver blobs, and I don’t see why you can’t implement SIM-locking outside of the open source software e.g. in hardware crypto.
But you can’t tell open source developers that they need to “obey” DRM. There is no way for an open source developer to “obey” DRM - you would have to lock users into a specific binary. And so the only consistent interpretation of that sentence is: please write code which implements DRM and give it to us for free. This is not something that is only known within the free software community. This is a widely publicised logical consequence of the ability to modify the software you use. Anyone interested and able can bypass it and publish a fix for the less able.
As you say, the best way to present this would be as a problem solving exercise. You can’t start a “dialogue” by opening with a request for the impossible.
The link you give doesn’t even explain why DRM is necessary. I assume it’s to prop up the market for the 99p ringtone for carriers. But without knowing the exact problem, how can we find a solution?
It’d also help if he didn’t insult us by saying that we need to be educated in order to obey intellectual property rights. We know what they are, thanks. That’s why we have licenses.
June 14th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Wait, users prefer subsidized phones with two year lock-in contracts? Are you sure? That certainly doesn’t match the evidence I’ve seen. The newest phone in my family, a Palm Centro, came subsidized by AT&T—because the plan was the same monthly price whether it was subsidized or not. I know of no real option for a less expensive monthly, more expensive up-front, unsubsidized phone plan. I’d love to hear about one.
June 14th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Some day someone in the F/OSS movement will devise a way to use DRM against “the man” to protect open source software and the F/OSS movement will have a collective nervous breakdown.
June 14th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
It’ll never happen. Part of the point of F/OSS is that the Man’s welcome to use all this. I can imagine wanting a DRM system in my house, for example. I just want to be able to turn it off when I like. I can imagine wanting a TPM “Fritz Chip”. I just want to be able to turn it off or make it lie when I want.
June 15th, 2008 at 11:23 am
His name is Jaaksi, not Jaaski.
June 15th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Well, it seems like the “slow process” to a free mobile phone/smartphone is nearly at an end: the Neo Freerunner (formerly known as Neo1973) by OpenMoko is in production/about to ship (see [0]).
Just want to add that to the discussion here. And that will be most certainly my next cell phone. It isn’t more expensive as the Nokia device I posses right now.
Greetings,
Drizzt
[0] http://wiki.openmoko.org/index.php?title=Community_Updates&oldid=34395
June 16th, 2008 at 4:03 am
Speling error: The man’s last name is Jaaksi, not Jaaski.
June 16th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
This was a great insight and read. It’s also a problem that seems to becoming more common in regards to the business/developer relationship or lack thereof. A majority of the current lack of communication I feel to be bred through the simple fact that this is opensource. On the one hand you have a developer scratching an itch for free on his/her own time and if they run into something they don’t like; they take their build tools, ideas and go home. On the other hand you have developers willing to work with business; yet the business simply doesn’t understand the business itself. Or they try to make their constraints that of the developer instead of explaining what would make it easier for X developer to extol their ideals of freedom/opensource throughout the market and solving problems by taking X appropriate steps instead of looking like hardline zealots.
June 17th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
[...] of one of my old professors and am a couple of chapters in. I am having what would be a communication problem, and/or am simply lacking the appropriate language to get my points across. However, it was pointed [...]
June 21st, 2008 at 1:13 am
But most Linux development today happens “on the clock” and many developers get paid by companies that have a stake in proprietary software or DRM. All 5 members of the “5C Entity” have released a Linux product. IBM and Intel both have substantial DRM investments and fund Linux development.
Why educate developer about something that employers could just tell them to do if necessary?