Open source helps Nokia cut development costs

Nokia’s N770 and N800 tablet PCs were developed with a conscious decision to use as much open source software as feasible.  This decision had tremendous benefits in cost savings, code quality, flexibilty, and zero licensing costs.  You can read the white paper    HT: Stephesblog.

If we compare the code from open source to the code developed by us, our conclusion is that open source is of better quality. We have more bugs and problems in the Nokia developed code. This is only natural because the majority of the Nokia code is build from scratch and is thus very young. Open source code, on the other hand, has mostly been used by others already. They have fixed the most severe errors already before we started to use the code.