Why Samsung won't open the Bada OS box The Wall Street Journal reckons Samsung is about to open-source its Bada OS, and then pitch it as a competitor to the increasingly patent-laden Android – but fails to properly explain why the South Korean giant would make such a move. Citing the usual "person familiar with the situation", the WSJ states that Samsung will open- …
I try not to discriminate against one news source, reporter, author or channel or another just because they tend to hold a different position to me, under the premise that this makes me worse than them, but sometimes the Wall Street Journal make it very very hard for me to actually read their publication.
Articles like this just make me marvel at their seemingly never ending "America is the only country that matters" stance and while Jeremy Clarksons oft repeated lines about American car engineers knowing nothing of roads in other parts of the world may be past their prime now, a case could certainly be made for American technology reporters not knowing anything about the way the rest of the world works!
Why is it so many people don't understand what Open Source is and isn't.
It isn't intrinsically better, it doesn't mean its free and its not the new messiah (it perhaps could be all of these things, but not BECAUSE its "open source" any more than a closed, commercial product would be any of these things)
I just wish the marketing clowns, stupid CIOs, politicians and even consumers would get the message.
There's so much fud in the mobile marketplace at the moment.
Intrinsically better to me means open, because I can mess with it, change things, break things, and end up with a device that does what I want the way I want it to.
"Better" is entirely subjective.
Open Source software is better, to me, even with limitations and less functionality than closed source competitors.
Maemo. An open-source, mobile phone OS backed by a major telecomms company... and it flopped miserably.
Admittedly, it was something of a skunkworks project and Nokia was notoriously bad at OS development, but still: just because something's open source, it doesn't mean it's going to succeed.
(it's a shame though - my N800 is still the best ebook reader I've found: you can read it in the dark and with the backlight turned to minimum, it'll quite happily last for over 6 hours on a single charge...)
Interestingly most if not all of Samsungs TV's have all or most of their firmware open sourced. I think it's because some of it was third party GPL licensed stuff but it dies suggest that Samsung is no stranger to it.
What advantages they would get from open source bada is another thing entirely.
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