I am Finnish, and I am professionally involved in the mobile software industry. That gives me a doubled interest in following the recent activities surrounding Nokia's top management. As the latest development, as was announced yesterday, Mr. Ari Jaaksi has now resigned from Nokia (the original news in Finnish). In my outsider perspective and perception, I always identified Jaaksi with Maemo (turned Meego) and all other Nokia's open source activities. He was always the open source speaker in conferences and the prominent visible open source person coming out of Nokia.

Again, I have no insider information whatsoever on what's going on there (I have never even worked for or been connected with Nokia, a weird anomaly given that I am Finnish and been involved in the mobile IT industry for a long time), so my speculation of course has no credibility at all, but luckily having a blog allows me to voice out my speculations in any case. That being said, I DO wonder how their software development strategies will be transformed, given that the very person who seemingly advocated all the open sourcing of their software products (Ari Jaaksi) has now left, and the bosses in charge while this took place (OPK, Vanjoki, Ollila, let's wait and see if there's more), have been leaving as well.

The people around me that have been listening to my opinions before would know that I've been absolutely lost trying to figure out as to why in the world did Nokia in its right mind gave away all its software voluntarily while stressing and fully acknowledging that software is of increasing importance to them and the industry (I remember such things being said by their leaders, just don't remember any URL for reference, please feel free to remind me in case you have one). Not only was everything open sourced (Symbian and Maemo, among other things), they've also seen it necessary to give control of the development to the community via "robust governance structures" (as I understood from some press statement that was made). In my very humble and subjective opinion, I find it that for a corporation this has been very odd behaviour (unless they figured that software development and control of it provides little or no significance to their business, which doesn't seem to have been the case).

Nothing new there of course, since I do have a feeling (based on what I've been reading in the blogosphere) that many people out there agree that indeed Nokia has slipped into this "very odd behaviour" in the recent past. The reaction to this then probably being their executive renewal that is currently taking place.

What I do wish to speculate is whether all this carries with it a hint of admission that giving away all of the software (and by saying that I mean "open sourcing" it, and I understand that strictly speaking those two are not exactly the same thing) and the control of developing it, may have indeed been a bad idea. Perhaps Mr. Jaaksi, as an open source advocate, would not wish to continue in a "new Nokia" that was less open source oriented?

And at this point, just to provide the necessary background and my stand on open source software in general, in the past I have been notorious for being an open source advocate around the people that I've dealt with (those who know me from my past can surely attest to this). We were the first ones to introduce Ubuntu to the Philippine corporate scene when it came out (in 2004, was it?). I personally went around company to company encouraging them to switch to all open source software, using Ubuntu and all the other products ranging from Jasper Reports to Sugar CRM to whatever, as long as it was open source. The employee manual I drafted for my company then actually stated that "As a general rule, we must always use free and open source software to perform our computing needs", followed by ".. even more so in client projects".

Following that thought, to this day I also continue to subscribe to a number of blogs that are open source oriented such as "The Open Road" by Matt Asay, "Linux and Open Source" by Dana Blankenhorn and Paula Rooney and "Mobile Open Source" by Fabrizio Capobianco. There are probably others in my subscription list that have just quieted down so much that I don't remember them anymore. Somehow it really feels that the noise on this front has started to calm down. I have read in various other news and am also fully aware that it is no secret that venture capital spending on open source focused businesses has more or less ended.

So to get back to what I was really writing about, I do wonder if Nokia's resignation frenzy carries with it the undertones of Nokia also joining what seems to be a general trend of these current times that is not as open source oriented as the trend before used to be.

In Nokia's case, if that really was the case, wouldn't that really mean that their open source strategy was just a really bad idea? During their full blast open source era, the company just descended into troubles. Is it (or should it be) a part of their corporate rescue package to now turn the ship around and go less open with the source and development governance?

In closing, since given this opportunity, I do wish the best of success for Nokia's transformation efforts and the new executives (some of which are probably still to be hired), remembering also that the economy of my country and the welfare of numerous people actually depend on it and its success. This is a great responsibility indeed, and it should be interesting to observe as the story continues to unfold.