Symbian's journey to EPL
The transition process involved three key steps: firstly sanity checking the code to ensure it was ready for EPL (patents, IP, license headers etc.), secondly working within corporate processes (e.g. requirements process within Nokia, general legal requirements and changes in package ownership) and thirdly co-ordinating the release both internally and externally (messaging, how open to be).
With a relatively small team it was important for the Symbian Foundation to manage it resources. There was a balance between fulfilling the open source promise and maintaining the ongoing feature development of the Symbian platform, especially given the major upcoming steps, such as the switch to Qt for the applications framework.
The completion of the process means everyone has access to the source code of the world's leading mobile platform. For the manufacturers it is the start of a 'new world'. Rather than being closed and purely reliant on internal innovation, it opens them up the whole world and new ways of open working. It integrates their way of working into a wider world of ideas and innovation.
What is the #symbiancountdown?
Last week the msyterious #symbiancountdown appeared on Twitter and the Symbian website. We offered you an an acrostic paragraph clue in our speculation.
As we now know it was a count down the full release of the Symbian^3 platform into EPL. The countdown number represented the number of packages remaining to be EPL'd. The number went down as the packages were uploaded to Symbian's Mercurial repository.
We asked Chris Davidson to explain both the #symbiancountdown and its origins.
See also
Symbian completes transition to opensource - including our video interview with Lee Williams