On Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:39, neal@walfield.org said:
components are Opera and Flash. As I point out in the note, Nokia holds back several important pieces of the platform including how the battery works and several central UI components. Unlike Opera, these components are less easily replaced, I think.
I have not looked in depth into this. I assumed that it falls into the category of firmware/bootloader/monitor. It is always hard to draw a line here. We are still living with non-free BIOSes and embedded platforms often use non-free monitors. This is nothing special with the Nokia devices. Well, with their claims to distribute a fully free device they should have provided the source for everything under their control. But, well they obviously use the same modules as for their phones and freeing it would allow people to tinker with the phones (what they definitely don't like).
In your article you mentioned that Maemo requires all libs to be LGPLed. To be frank, that is nothing special: Both, KDE and GNOME have this requirement. I had discussions with KDE maintainers in the past on how to get a GPLed library (GPGME) into KDE proper. This was one of the reasons we later switched to LGPL for that library. The claimed reason for the LGPL requirement is that some companies are using the core KDE libraries for proprietary projects.
Salam-Shalom,
Werner