The Risk of opening Symbian

[slitchfield]

Symbian is now open source, which will no doubt attract new developers with new ideas. Any manufacturer can freely use and change Symbian in their devices. It's an exciting future - or is it? David Gilson discusses the potential downside of Symbian being open source, in a powerful editorial that needs to be taken to heart by Symbian and its partners.

Read on in the full article.

I agree with you 100%. Even now S60 on top of Symbian isn't as unified as it once was; there is a big difference even between the E Series and N Series that should not exist beyond physical attributes. What was once a standard button for S60 (the pencil/edit key), has now been removed from all newer handsets. And why? Not only is cut and paste now a pain to perform, but it just added something more on that long options list that is also includes the redundant "show open application" that should be handle by the (Menu/Task Manager) key only... Anyway, before I get off topic again, LOL. I am all for the new Symbian Foundation's strategy to move the OS forward, I just hope that a sense of uniformity and consistency is kept at all time. This will not only alleviate developers coding execution, but it will also highlight the value of Symbian as an open source OS against closed OS like the iPhone's Mac OS X.

That's good news! I wanna see a Symbian variant with interface like Android with a Palm Pre multitasking. Any problem with that??

[mandara]

Oh my god!!!! Now everyone will fork they own ver. of Symbian and Symbian will become the most popular OS for feature-phones. Every app will work on just one dumbphone. /sarcasm
Symbian is currently pretty much already non-unified. You have 5-th edition, 3rd edition. E-series, N-series...
So, what should Symbian do? Roll-back and close everything so it wouldn't fork?
Yes, forking is a problem, but Symbian now has pretty strong competition and it don't have any other choices. What's better, to fork Symbian or to not use it at all?

yea have to agree love thie idea of open source but don;t want a hundred and one different distros. ideally want the flexibility of open source but the polish and usability of say the iphone as altho it lacks some things it looks and feels easy to use

3rd edition to 5th edition cannot be described as a fork - they're merely different versions. This happens all the time in software. Yes the iPhone has 1 version that apps are compatible for, making it all very simple - but let's see how long Apple can maintain this for. The iPhone is a mear 2 and a half years old, which I think you'll find is still shorter than the distance between S60 3rd edition and 5th edition.

[boxieblue]

nice article. but do i agree with this? not necessarily. Over at LaymanHack.com i have replied to this article with some of my own opinions. Mainly, i feel comparing Linux for desktops to Symbian was unfair. Check out the post.

iphone is not going to last in this form. i mean, look at 3gs vs 3g. and think about next versions: there will soon be applications that requires a specific version of iphone. so, i prefer an open platform.

Couple of points here:
- Linux hasn't forked. Those are all distributions - but same Linux kernel, same KDE, same Gnome. Just different ways of packaging. You'd expect Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson to retain their own packaging so no problem here
- Forking generally only occurs when maintainers won't listen and even then it will fold back in e.g. gcc. Other cases that might fork are MySQL and OpenOffice because they don't always take a patch. But if they do fork then one will probably quickly become dominant.

So overall the threat of forking helps people keep on their toes and actually makes open source much better.

[Mark Wilcox]

This whole article is based on a licensing mis-understanding:

"Being released under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL), anyone can take the source code, do anything they like with it, and not contribute any code back to the Symbian Foundation."

This is wrong!

The EPL is a weak copyleft license. If anyone changes any of the platform code then they have to release the source code to those changes. What they can do is add extra components or replace components and keep the code for those closed.

In addition to this, Symbian will have a compatibility program such that if OEMs don't maintain binary compatibility for the public APIs then they can't use the Symbian name (i.e. they can't claim it's a Symbian device if it isn't compatible).

An OEM can create their own UI, but they have to keep Qt compatibility (Symbian^4 onwards) for example, so all the apps that are built on Qt will work across all devices.

This is in contrast to Android, which has a permissive license (Apache) and no compatibility promise, for which the original statement would be correct.

Hope that helps clear it up.

Not that all of that doesn't prevent someone forking Symbian and us not wanting to take the changes back, but it does make it very much less likely. Even the GPL hasn't stopped Google forking the Linux kernel, so it could happen.

[Kazutoyo]

The thing I hope for the most is that the future default Symbian music player will be able to play ogg vorbis files (which is a open & patent-free music format).

this would make the sanzhai (fake brand) china phone to raise to a new bar.

In the past we'll see fake nokia brand phone with very bad looking OS, in the future the fake nokia fone will have symbian OS.

[mandara]

Very nice explanation Mark!

[oscillik]

Originally Posted by mikescandy

iphone is not going to last in this form. i mean, look at 3gs vs 3g. and think about next versions: there will soon be applications that requires a specific version of iphone. so, i prefer an open platform.

in a way, this has already happened - the iPad is essentially just an iPod touch. yet it has a separate version of the "iPhone OS".

Originally Posted by imcdnzl

Couple of points here:
- Linux hasn't forked. Those are all distributions - but same Linux kernel, same KDE, same Gnome. Just different ways of packaging. You'd expect Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson to retain their own packaging so no problem here
- Forking generally only occurs when maintainers won't listen and even then it will fold back in e.g. gcc. Other cases that might fork are MySQL and OpenOffice because they don't always take a patch. But if they do fork then one will probably quickly become dominant.

So overall the threat of forking helps people keep on their toes and actually makes open source much better.

while i agree that using the term "fork" was not correct in this article, the whole idea of mind-share is still an issue that is quite relevant here. a perfect example of how Symbian has followed a similar path to how Android is at the moment is by looking at it's heritage - EPOC.

EPOC32 started out with Psion and although there were different devices by different manufacturers running EPOC32, the only difference between the software running on the devices was maybe an icon theme and the odd application (the Phone app on the Ericsson MC218 springs to mind).

Then Symbian happened. And we get three different variants of Symbian, those being Quartz (UIQ), Crystal (Series80), and Sapphire (Series60). The whole point of Symbian at this point was to have a generic UI. This obviously didn't happen. While they all share a common underlying "kernel", they all have quite different paradigms in terms of the user interacting with the software.

My own stance on all of this is: Symbian has always worn different faces, from the point of view of the general customer. This development of the operating system being open source will not change that, except for there being a possibly larger choice.

[mandara]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

this would make the sanzhai (fake brand) china phone to raise to a new bar.

In the past we'll see fake nokia brand phone with very bad looking OS, in the future the fake nokia fone will have symbian OS.

Possibly but unlikely. Do you think they will put symbian on hardware that can run it decently.