Symbian and its partners today announced that OPL will become an Open Source project. The exact workings are still being worked out, but All About Symbian will be involved in the planning. Various Symbian partners have indicated that they will be looking to assist the current Development Team in porting OPL to the Series 60 and UIQ devices.

So what does all this mean? The first thing is that OPL has not died. There is a large pool of hobby developers out there who want to get started in programming using a simple to learn language (exactly what OPL was designed for). Symbian have always acknowledged this in private, but have had to take into account certain business considerations, which has held up developmet of OPL.

This barrier has now been removed, with interested parties to be given access to the source code; and with other experienced Tools Vendors and Partners offering to support OPL, it would be fair to say that OPL is shortly going to be the language that belongs to the community - which can only be of benefit. It should be able to be ported with minimal effort onto the Series 60 range of machines, and a P800 port is a strong possibility.

Now, before you all run off to the Symbian Website to download the code, be aware that although it has been announced, the mechanisms are not yet in place. I suspect that there will something akin to Sourceforge set up, and while you can all have a go at compiling the runtime, there will always be an 'official' Symbain version (similar to the way Linux is developed at the moment).

My opinion is that the Partner Companies working with Symbian are going to be the ones that will want to have a look at the code as soon as possible, with an eye to bringing it up to a beta release on various devices. They recognise where the Hobby Developer fits into the community, and certainly these last few month have shown that the hobby developers are being welcomed back into the Symbian arena. Lets not forget Symbian have had a difficult year or two getting everything in place, and some things had to be deferred. OPL was one of them.

Trust me on this one guys, there is a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on, and All About Symbian will keep you all informed of the important developments as and when they happen. The first half of 2003 looks to be very interesting...