The New Executive Director - Lee Williams and the Symbian Foundation
Published by Steve Litchfield at 10:37 UTC, October 28th 2008
At the Symbian Smartphone Show last week, S60's Lee Williams was announced as the Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation. Right after that, in an exclusive interview for All About Symbian, he sat down with Rafe and Ewan to talk in more depth about the plans for the Foundation, and to discuss what he brings to the table.
Extract: "The main difference is that everyone involved can be seen as owners in their parts of the foundation," explains Williams. Be it code, marketing, or otherwise, these portions can be driven forward to their satisfaction and with their specialist knowledge. The UIQ interface is a good example here, and many of what was learned in that UI can be applied to the upcoming unified platform that will be the prime Open Source product.
In practical terms the platform will be split up into a hundred or so packages. Each package will have an owner responsible for the design, quality and future plans of the code within the package. Package owners will be responsible for co-ordinating with potential contributors and other package owners. Initially package onwers will be individuals from companies that contributed the respective code. As I raise an eyebrow at this phraseology, Williams notes. "Perhaps I should use the term guide and not owner. The concept of ownership here is in the Open Source concept, not in a propietory business sense with any sort of territorial ideas." Clearly Nokia will necessarily 'own' many of the packages, but a more even spread among foundation members is a clear target and something that Williams considers a "key metric" for measuring success."
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News Discussion
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Originally Posted by Hooligooner
Didn't he used to be in Deacon Blue?
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You can check out the stats page directly here at http://odesk.com/trends/iphone
Does this mean that the future of smart phone apps are in OUR hands now, and not a room of cubes at Nokia?
The Symbian Foundation will enable phones that target a much, much larger part of the market (50+%).
Still you could argue there's things the foundation could learn about dealing with developers / distribution etc. But it is rarely as simple as people think.