Nokia doesn’t get it
Okay, I’m no longer cautiously optimistic about the N900. I’ve officially crossed it off my list, and any claims that Nokians make about the N900 being an actual open source platform are patently false.
This reminded me of bug #176 opened in 2005 (yes, 4 years and 4.5 hardware iterations ago): The N900 still does not have native ogg support. This means to me that Nokia deliberately removed that support. They must have; all the underlying software (gstreamer, etc) has it by default.
If the N900 was, in fact, an open source project, ogg support would have been added by the community. Heck, I looked at adding it myself back in the day. But it’s not there, therefore the N900 is not open source. Oh well. There’s always the N910, that’s sure to come out in 6 months. Maybe Nokia will have gotten their act together by then.
The last time I checked, open source wasn’t “must accept any patches submitted by the community”
As far as I’m concerned, there are 2 key things that are necessary for true open source: 1) I can get and modify the source; 2) I can get my modifications back upstream. There appears to be no way to get modifications into the N900, without getting them into the upstream projects, and even then, Nokia might rip them out.
Just giving me the source isn’t really open source in my book.
As far as I can tell they have an pretty organized community around maemo an it is easy to download the gstreamer plugin to ogg from it.
The only catch is that the plugin runs on the arm and not on the DSP, because the code for the DSP was licensed by Nokia and is closed, this is why they do not provide it as official.
See:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Playing_OGG_files
I know about adding ogg support. I have both a 770 and a n810 (but won’t be getting a n900; Even without this issue, $650 is *way* to much for me). That’s besides the point.
Nokia deliberately removed ogg support. I can add it back, but what does the fact that they removed it, and that there’s no way for me to get it into the default firmware (or get anything else in, for that matter) say about Nokia, and their commitment to the community? The community wants ogg support, but it’s not there.
I’ve been fairly closely following Maemo for 4+ years now, and actively involved off and on, and I’m disillusioned now. It would take some serious changes (like, say mailing lists, proper VCS access, and actual indications that they will accept patches and changes from the community) for me to come back into the Maemo/N900 fold.
It’s too bad, too. Aside from the price, the N900 is a very nice set of kit.
Would this have anything to do with them being against ogg in html5? Maybe refusing to incorporate ogg support is more of a political decision.
That’s possible; I’m not speculating at this point as to why they did it, that’s sort of besides my point. They did it, and that’s what’s important to me.