28.7.08

An inside (personal) view of the Symbian deal

There is quite a lot of buzz around Nokia's buyout of symbian and unify s60,UIQ ,MOAB , and the new Open source mobile platform . What this deal meant to the mobile space ? Does it mean that open source model is getting accepted in mobile space ? i guess yes .

Nokia involved in a few open source projects ( most importantly Maemo ) , but this is a strategic and important move from nokia. It looks they open sourcing massive amount of symbian and s60 code , its a good news atleast for the licencess .

Recently i read an article in Nokia conversations where they talking with Janne Jalkanen about the Symbian deal . Its a good read . More here . He not only has experience with the inner workings of S60 in Nokia, but he was the creator of JSPwiki, a popular open source Java-based wiki sofware.

Few excerpts from article here

"I doubt that open sourcing Symbian is going to help in the community building though. There are two kinds of OSS developers: the guys who do things for fun, and the guys who do OSS because they are paid to do so. In order for an open source project to really flourish and take over the world, you need both.

"The problem with Symbian is that very, very few people touch it for fun. So I believe that while we can open source it, it is going to be very difficult to get people participate out of their own free will, unless we are prepared to make very serious refactorings to the entire system.

"Still, it is going to keep Symbian in the game a little longer. While many people dislike it (just go to any Finnish IT newspaper discussion board to verify this), the fact is that it does carry a significant amount of gold home every day. So we must be doing something right, and my bank account would very much like to us keep doing that."

keep reading here .


PS : If you dont know what maemo is , Excerpts from wikipedia here . The Maemo platform is the software stack for Nokia Internet Tablets, which includes Internet Tablet OS and the Maemo SDK. The Maemo platform is developed by the Maemo Software department within Nokia.The Maemo platform includes the Internet Tablet OS, which is based on Debian GNU/Linux and draws much of its GUI, frameworks, and libraries from the GNOME project. It uses the Matchbox window manager, and like Ubuntu Mobile, it uses the GTK-based Hildon as its GUI and application framework.The Maemo SDK is based around the Debian-oriented Scratchbox Cross Compilation Toolkit, which provides a sandbox environment in which development may take place. Scratchbox uses Qemu to emulate an ARMEL processor or sbrsh to remotely execute instructions. Scratchbox-compatible rootstraps are available for both x86 and ARMEL, so the majority of development and debugging takes place on x86, with final packaging being for ARMEL.

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