Symbian Foundation completes move to open source

The person claiming to be an industry analyst appears to not understand the difference between Symbian and Nokia. Ovi Maps is not part of Symbian, and is not open source, so any other manufacturers adopting Symbian will not have a free navigation solution to go with it. Same with the app store and other Nokia services. Surely Nokia's dominance of the platform is still the biggest obstacle to its wider adoption.

Dynite wrote:Enfors -

For a start, the software in the N93 wasn't open sourced, so short answer "no".

The software in the N93 was S60, which is now being made open source. Neither of us know if this includes older versions (such as that used by the N93) or just the current versions.

Generally speaking lets say you make a bug fix and that fix you submit to Symbian and it is accepted as a fix and is living in Symbian's mercurial server.

Nokia, Samsung, whoever; ever-so often will take the master version from mercurial including your fix and may choose to create a new firmware update for phoneX out of that new release.

So yes your changes have made it onto your device, but only because Nokia decided to use that update.

Yes, that is how it would work, but the question is not how it would work. The question is does Nokia want to use code contributions from 3rd parties or not. It could very well be that they just let us make our own versions which they then are not interested in.

Rafe wrote:It's the core platform and applications that are done by Symbian.

As I'm sure you know, it's not even done by us. We just integrate and test it.

Theoertically you could compile your own version of the OS an run it on any phone

Or you can build your own phone.

Note at the moment you need to compile it onto ARM hardware, howver there should be a QNX based emulator available soon so you'll be able to see for yourself

Actually no. The PDK includes an X86 compile and the old school emulator epoc.exe. However, the touch interface doesn't work yet, so the quite significant single tap UI improvements are basically impossible to test. Very frustrating.

Basically it doesn't mean much for existing phones...

What would be nice to see is Samsung releasing (binary) drivers for the i8910, since it has an active hacking community. Then we could possibly see S^3 running on it. I'm not sure who can convince them to do that though.

Symbian Signed continues, costs were cut - down to 10 EUR for Express Signed. I agree cost is hugely important (and generally under rated).

Yeah I'm not entirely happy with the pace that Symbian Signed is improving. There is still a lot to do.

Thanks for clearing that up tecknolog. I should have taken more care when answering 😊

Next I'll say the code for the platform and applications are provided through the Symbian Foundation after being contributed to the SF. Manufacturers may still need to 'finish' it off with their own extras before taking it to the market (or not depending on what product they are creating)... A good example of this is Sony Ericsson 'panels' in the Satio and Vivaz.

The PDK does work under x86, but for intent an purposes it doesn't really let you 'see' anything. Useful for device makers for sure though. It does look like things are progressing nicely, but it is a shame people can't see S^3 yet.

I would love to Samsung release this stuff, and will be asking them about this at MWC, but I'm not going to hold my breath. I'm hoping this sort of thing will be more common in the future too.

You'l be seeing more on Wild Ducks on the site shortly (Monday hopefully).

Enfors - the open sourcing applies to Symbian^3 not to the old versions.

As to whether Nokia will use other people's contributions... well they've already handed the image and video editor packages over to Ixonos (a third party). And they've been a driving force behind the move to open source so yes they will. It's about cutting costs for them.

But it is worth pointing out that for code to be accepepetd back into the platform there is a process to go through. That's the same as any open source project. Based on a meritocracy essentially...

Rafe wrote:Enfors - the open sourcing applies to Symbian^3 not to the old versions.

As to whether Nokia will use other people's contributions... well they've already handed the image and video editor packages over to Ixonos (a third party). And they've been a driving force behind the move to open source so yes they will. It's about cutting costs for them.

But it is worth pointing out that for code to be accepepetd back into the platform there is a process to go through. That's the same as any open source project. Based on a meritocracy essentially...

This sounds promising. I hope it's true. That could mean that from now on, phones are less likely to be "abandoned", like the Nokia N93 was (Nokia stopped releasing new firmware versions of it 2 months after release). Because there will probably be enthusiasts willing to make new firmware versions for their favourite phone, and I hope Nokia embraces that and pushes their firmware versions through official channels.

.
I think this is a misnomer. It was really Symbian C++ which was difficult, and the S60 UI framework - I forget the name. ...and I think they're whining anyway. They're just complaining because it has 'C++' in the title and it isn't what they know as C++ - too many lazy programmers not willing to learn something different.

As a professional developer on Symbian since 1998, let me assure you these developers are not whining. The problem wasn't mainly Symbian C++ though, but S60/Avkon. Programming is not some kind of zen-like self-improvement scheme, but an economic activity, and the difficulties you encountered while you had to program for S60 made it for lots of people an uneconomic activity.

In any case, what other platform allows you to program in so many different languages. The developer is really spoiled for choice. I'm sure someone can compare them with the other platforms, but, IINM, Android only allows Java (and web runtime?) and iPhone only Objective C.
Yeah, having limited you to so few options [1] mean you can make those options much sleeker in SDK/IDE terms, and there is surely some work to do there on the Symbian front, but still.

Sigh. Programming is not about having to choose from lots of languages that are all bad at at least one thing that is vital for your app. None of the languages offer an order-of-magnitude improvement in development speed, compared to C++. Apart from Java and webkit, none of the languages was part of the SDK, for instance and that means that there is no proper support for these languages.
And because Symbian spent time on the half-baked support for these extra languages, the did not spent these resources on improving the C++ documentation, which became worse over time.

Basically, all this runtime rubbish was a way to attract developers to replace the C++ developers who became more and more dissatisfied with the platform because there was little money to be made.

svdwal wrote:Basically, all this runtime rubbish was a way to attract developers to replace the C++ developers who became more and more dissatisfied with the platform because there was little money to be made.

However, the good coders who were capable of producing good applications that people actually wanted found Symbian coding extremely lucrative, and becoming evermore lucractive since the iPhone ignited interest in downloading apps. (the Apple AppStore popularity doesn't just benefit Apple).

Those lazy-arsed lamers who jumped ship when they found there was hard work required should be kicking themselves now.

Having free software for your phone does not mean being able to flash it in a physical mobile phone. And it is impossible to do a meaningful change in a program if it cannot be tested (and retested, and retested).

So, unless at least unlocked phones come with the possibility of being reflashed, it won't matter a single bit whether the operating system is free or not. Not only will it be impossible to use whatever improvements the free software community comes up with, but it will be impossible for them to come up with any improvements to start with.

Without the hardware, free software is not worth a damn. Only the hardware makers will be able to develop, and in the case of Symbian that mostly means Nokia.

The whole point might just be making Samsung and Sony-Ericsson comfortable with using a competitor's OS and stop them from fleeing to Android. For the rest of the world, there's probably not much to be excited on.

I'm afraid you're quite wrong, since many people are already contributing (and obviously testing their changes). There's not an open phone that runs Symbian yet, but that doesn't mean there's not a variety of reference platforms - as well as a simulator. Everyone would like to see such a device, but I'm never going to buy the idea that it's necessary for development to take place.

If this is the biggest move to open source... we wouldn't know. A few years ago Ingres Database went to Open Source... and thats far more implemented into software systems all over the world than symbian ever has been. Even though I think its the right move fore symbian in the end.

Unregistered wrote:If this is the biggest move to open source... we wouldn't know. A few years ago Ingres Database went to Open Source... and thats far more implemented into software systems all over the world than symbian ever has been. Even though I think its the right move fore symbian in the end.

Ingres source code was always available right from the beginning. Ingres was commercialised into several products rather than the other way round. A few years ago Ingres went to GNU public, but there was no handover because the source was already out there.

It's one thing to make it open source. It's another thing to get other manufacturers interested in it in a meaningful way.

If I'm another manufacturer (e.g. HTC, Motorola, Samsung) comparing the OS choices (Symbian, Android, WinMo, or proprietary), what does Symbian offer that other OSes don't? By this I mean Symbian, not Nokia. A large installed base of my competitor's phones doesn't necessarily help me. Neither does an existing library of applications that need to be ported, or will never be available to me (Ovi Maps). As long as this is perceived as "Nokia's OS" then it may be unlikely to attract others who won't be able to offer the range of services that up to now have been almost synonymous with Symbian (apart from the handful of Samsung and other phones who have already been using earlier versions).

Is there anything about SF's announcement that makes you think differently? That said, it isn't necessarily a bad thing if Symbian's fortunes are tied almost exclusively to Nokia's. Apple and RIM have completely closed shops that are doing well.

Unregistered wrote:However, the good coders who were capable of producing good applications that people actually wanted found Symbian coding extremely lucrative, and becoming evermore lucractive since the iPhone ignited interest in downloading apps. (the Apple AppStore popularity doesn't just benefit Apple).

I do not know about all commercial developers sales results, but from the ones that I do know, App Store sales were an order of magnitude bigger when it was just opened. That gap is now closing rapidly.

Those lazy-arsed lamers who jumped ship when they found there was hard work required should be kicking themselves now.

And now, with Nokia gaining in strength is becomes possible to make Apple more developer-friendly.