At the inaugural “Open Source in Mobile” conference this week in Amsterdam, Nokia's director of open source, Dr. Ari Jaaksi, compared community- versus corporate-controlled distribution and middleware development for mobile phones. Jaaksi generously agreed to share his presentation with LinuxDevices.com readers.

Dr. Jaaksi's presentation focuses on Nokia's experience working with the Nokia-sponsored Maemo open source community, which maintains Linux-based software used in Nokia's 770 Internet Tablet. He says that working with the community led to improved R&D efficiency, citing key community contributions such as Armin Warda's flash card swap partition hack. The hack solved the “biggest problem in OS 2005,” he said, and was adopted in OS 2006, the 770's second-generation firmware.

Additional benefits of community-based development cited by Jaaksi include flexibility in software sourcing, and flexibility in software architectures and choices, among others. Click below to learn more.

(Click image to view presentation)
Dr. Jaaksi previously spoke with LinuxDevices.com founder Rick Lehrbaum last December, when the 770 tablet first shipped.

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