readthemall writes to let us know that the Symbian Foundation has released the first of several packages in their plan to open source the entire Symbian mobile OS. "On Wednesday, Symbian made available its first package covered by the EPL, the OS Security Package, according to Symbian developer Craig Heath. 'The OS Security Package source code is now available under the EPL, and it is the very first package to be officially moved from the closed Symbian Foundation License (SFL) to... the EPL,' Heath wrote in a blog post. Heath said the EPL would allow the security package to bypass export regulations in the UK, where the Symbian code is legally based."
That's the thing I don't understand about the whole Symbian open sourcing and the excitement around it. Unless I am off-base, it's not like a programmer will be able to pick up the Symbian codebase, make a modification, compile a new kernel and flash it into his phone. If that's the level of open-sourcing we're talking about here, disabling 'Symbian Signed' will be trivial. Is this geared more toward device manufacturers? IE. end-users and developers need not care?
Look, that's definitely good news (especially the part of the Symbian Foundation using EPL instead of inventing some special license of their own). But does it really matter that much now? I mean that writing apps for Symbian is a horrible experience (as has been highlighted multiple times here on Slashdot, too), and now that Android has arrived and brought a much more friendly programming environment, this step is too little, too late.
dude, maybe you should read a bit closer before posting
There is nothing to read closer as I quoted exactly what you typed. The GGP never said or implied that the Symbian foundation owned Qt. Secondly, your implication about the Symbian version of Qt wasn't open source was also false.
Cos several hundred million phones produced by the largest phone manufacturers in the world are all just going to go away. Are you living on Android world?
Not all Nokia phones use Symbian. However, with Qt for S60 on the horizon, Symbian-specific skills are likely to become irrelevant. I strongly suspect that Nokia will be pushing Qt as the main toolkit/API for their [smart]phones, after which they will be free to dump the steaming pile that is Symbian and switch to Linux.
Once again, I'm not saying that Nokia is in trouble: with their apparent migration towards Linux + Qt, they will be fine. I'm saying that open sourcing Symbian isn't likely to save it, and
I strongly suspect that Nokia will be pushing Qt as the main toolkit/API for their [smart]phones, after which they will be free to dump the steaming pile that is Symbian and switch to Linux.
Yes, they are going to go through all the effort of porting Qt to Symbian only to ditch Symbian for Linux. Oh wait... Just because they are pushing out a few devices using Linux in no way means they are dropping Symbian.
Once again, I'm not saying that Nokia is in trouble: with their apparent migration towards Linux + Qt, they will be fine.
What apparent migration? Please provide any actual statements from Nokia that even remotely hint at them dropping Symbian to go all Linux.
For developers looking to make money, and use a very rich set of APIs/functionality, Symbian is the way to go. Gartner recently announced that Symbian has 49.5% of ww smart phone market share (300m+ devices). The distribution channel potential is there for developers to take advantage of now - not some unknown time in the future. Note that Symbian also has Runtime dev environments for Web, Python, and Adobe Flash Lite - who else has that?
I'm glad to see someone has actually heard of it.:) It seems like every day there is yet another article comparing the "major smart phones": apple, blackberry, windows mobile, android. Having worked for Nokia Mobile Software, I find the omissions of symbian devices annoying.
Some moron in the Times (of London) annoyed me by saying "Windows Mobile, the operating system that runs on most smartphones...". He then later stated that it was Google Chrome that caused Microsoft to fix IE. Aaaaaaaaaaagh you're fired as technical editor.
I no longer work for Nokia and I'm not sure how this is even a topical response, but I'll go ahead and answer anyway: never.
Nokia phones are still proprietary hardware and even if they were to be able to run an open source symbian version (there isn't one yet), the adaptation layer is still not open source. Ignoring that, S60 itself isn't open source. Ignoring that, Nokia has always attempted to make custom firmware exceedingly difficult (storing flash images as partially encrypted to a specific asic ser
Gartner recently announced that Symbian has 49.5% of ww smart phone market share (300m+ devices)
Yeah, but... which Symbian? What non-developers usually don't get is that currently Symbian is a lot like Linux - strictly speaking it's little more then an OS kernel with a bunch of low-level APIs. What users see, the GUI, is fragmented in the same way GNOME and KDE are fragmented, and with much worse results. The developers must build different versions of their application (UIQ, S60, others) for different devi
Symbian World has settled on S60 V3 for a long time with the V5 (touch based) things getting popular for people using and enjoying a full touchscreen device. V3 and V5 doesn't differ too much.
Looking to future, it seems gaining a community&users with S60 V3 and keeping an eye open for Trolltech Qt UI makes sense. Of course one must not forget the Symbian handsets have surprisingly good, compatible J2ME with all kind of features you may want.
Qt will also bring discipline to scene. Obviously huge load of
We know. We make money on it. But even better is J2ME. Pretty much everything got it. Phones, PDAs, handheld consoles, in-car-systems, you name it. Sure "write once, run everywhere" is just true in theory, because the devices are different. But when you got your JSR-XXX APIs, it gets very close to it. You just have to be very flexible about the hardware caps, including keys, screen, memory, cpu power, sound mixer, etc.
and now that Android has arrived and brought a much more friendly programming environment, this step is too little, too late.
Too bad the figures don't bear you out what with Symbian powering almost 50% of all smart phones while Android is fighting to get more than 2-3% of the market. There are more Symbian-powered phones sold each quarter than there are even total devices running Android.
Well until recently, Android was 1 phone, 1 manufacturer, 1 carrier. All that is changing. Europe has a nice jump on the US in rolling out new Android phones. Personally, I think the US is purposely dragging their feet for a combination of trying to get rid of existing phones and stalling to get their 3G networks in better shape.. I suspect that you'll find, that comparing 4th quarter numbers for 2008, 2009, 2010 will lead you to a different conclusion of where the market is heading.. but who knows, there a
Sorry, but me as a game designer am not going to invest development time into Android, because it is locked down. The same is even more true for the iPhone, that has not even got a JVM.
The Symbian API may be crappy, but it still is the best we got. And from what I heard, we will soon have a new Qtopia stack and most importantly:
They want to make it open-source, so that they can use the benefits of all other open source projects, and integrate as much of them into Symbian, until it pretty much is a Linux-Symb
With Symbian and Android now free, what is the reason for even producing a Windows Mobile handset anymore? I mean, why pay extra for a license when you can just customize your own OS for next to nothing?
I don't know... maybe because people will continue buying WinMobile handsets for the same reason they continue to buy Windows PCs? Getting access to Windows-only apps, that is, and a familiar (no matter how bad) user experience.
maybe because people will continue buying WinMobile handsets for the same reason they continue to buy Windows PCs?
Happily stopped purchasing Windows products over a year and a half ago, should have done it sooner. I am finding that in every category, even Graphics editing, Movie playing and mail / office apps, my FREEDOM with #Linux is superior than the limitations forced on me via vendor-lockin.
Remember, buy Linux PCs from a Vendor like ZaReason [zareason.com] that builds the PC, laptop, netbook, multi-media machine from the ground up with Linux in mind, thus no issues with anything, their Linux machines just work right out of the box.
When my friends could no longer reformat their PCs hard drive + reinstall their purchased Microsoft OS in order to clean out bloat and remove viruses, adware, etc, I just shook my head and reminded them why Microsoft lost my
With Symbian and Android now free, what is the reason for even producing a Windows Mobile handset anymore?
The Microsoft kickbacks, of course.
Otherwise you'd just run Android, I don't see the appeal of free Symbian myself when you could have something more modern and with better application potential.
And such thinking gave us the Year of the Linux desktop years ago! Oh wait... The licensing costs for WinMo are a pittance to the device manufacturers when it comes to the total cost to make the device especially since all the big phone companies definitely negotiate bulk license rates when dealing with Microsoft. If you honestly think these big phone manufacturers that rake in 10s of billions in revenue a year care about that mere pittance they throw to Microsoft for WinMo you are horrible naive. It's
What was great about Windows Mobile before? That you could get cracked more easily? That it ate all the power and your battery died after 2 hours? Or that it was more expensive and buggy? ^^
"Easy" in this case means "so easy a monkey could do it": if you target.NET Compact Framework, you fire up VS, create a new "Smart Device" project, and immediately see a visual form editor where you can drag widgets around and hook up events; then press F5, and the emulator will automatically be launched, your application built and deployed, and debugging starts.
This is the one big reason why Symbian is such a failure.
I wish I could be as big of a failure as Symbian where in around 18 million phones per quarter are sold with it installed and it holds 50% of the smart phone OS market.
This is a huge part of why Symbian failed - while WinMo has adopted the Windows development model, with really fantastic Visual Studio support and free exchange of applications, Symbian has a) sucky development tools, b) cannot even reach an agreement with itself on what toolkit to use for the UI - think GNOME/KDE but on a more massive scale and without the user having the ability to install "the other one" and c) requires *licencing* to distribute an application to any device. The last one is IMO what real
I'll quote the wiki: "Symbian OS kernel (EKA2) supports sufficiently-fast real-time response such that it is possible to build a single-core phone around itâ"that is, a phone in which a single processor core executes both the user applications and the signalling stack. This is a feature which is not available in Linux. This has allowed SymbianOS EKA2 phones to become smaller, cheaper and more power efficient.[citation needed]"
Is that even true? If not, we should take it up on the discussion page.
Well it's sort of irrelevant now. Most phone chipsets have two ARM cores - one for the signalling and one for the application.
And as someone put it if you're developing a phone do you really want to deal with bugs like "when I play this Britney Spears MP3 my phone drops calls" or worse "phone fails radio test at the testhouse, seems to depend which application is running but we can't figure out how".
If you put both the applications and the signalling stack on the same ARM you're pretty much asking for this.
The PalmOS calendar was also superior to anything I've seen on any of the smart phones I've looked at. It boggles the mind that we could have gone so far backwards on such a basic core feature.
According to this [wikipedia.org] EPL and GPL are incompatible due to diferening patent restrictions, however if there are no patents covering the code (or the patents are invalid), could the code be linked and redistributed under either
Look to N97 and aging E90. They all belong to 9000 family of Nokia which is particularly interesting since the user base of them are following the incarnation of the models. E.g. 9200 users moved to 9300, 9300 moved to E90 and they now consider N97. It is almost like iPod community.
Nokia has been making true netbooks for almost a decade while nobody seems to care. It started with Psion in fact, grandfather of Symbian.
Of course, Nokia was never stupid to think that users would want a non performing Windows o
It's there - called Raptor. We haven't done gcc-e support yet but its coming soon. You can set up a cliuster of Linux machines and run it on them to speed up your builds
(I am a Nokia employee - sorry if it's not proper Slashdot etiquette to post like this.
Sorry - I realise that I was assuming you meant a Symbian dev environment for Linux. Anyhow there is one and it's getting lots of effort poured into it.
get rid of symbian signed.. (Score:2, Insightful)
whats the point of this if all apps need to be signed by an external authority?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the thing I don't understand about the whole Symbian open sourcing and the excitement around it. Unless I am off-base, it's not like a programmer will be able to pick up the Symbian codebase, make a modification, compile a new kernel and flash it into his phone. If that's the level of open-sourcing we're talking about here, disabling 'Symbian Signed' will be trivial. Is this geared more toward device manufacturers? IE. end-users and developers need not care?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
They still want to be like Apple.
And it is worth big money to them to be able to absolutely control what can be installed on "your" phone.
Okay... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
You should soon be able to use Qt for Symbian development.
Nokia own both Symbian and Qt, and the Qt labs blog is reporting Qt being ported to S60.
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/06/29/port-of-qtwebkit-to-s60/ [trolltech.com]
Note that Qt is an entire cross-platform library, not just for GUI - it includes stuff like threads, network comms, XML even WebKit!
Parent
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Isn't Qt owned by Nokia, not the symbian foundation?
Do you have a problem reading? From the GP:
Nokia own both Symbian and Qt
Where in his post did he say that Qt was owned by the Symbian foundation?
It doesn't say anything about open sourcing the symbian version of Qt.
The Qt for S60 Technology Preview is available under a special technology preview license, GNU LGPL version 2.1 and GPL version 3.
http://www.qtsoftware.com/developer/technical-preview-qt-for-s60 [qtsoftware.com]
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dude, maybe you should read a bit closer before posting
There is nothing to read closer as I quoted exactly what you typed. The GGP never said or implied that the Symbian foundation owned Qt. Secondly, your implication about the Symbian version of Qt wasn't open source was also false.
Right (Score:3, Informative)
this step is too little, too late.
Cos several hundred million phones produced by the largest phone manufacturers in the world are all just going to go away. Are you living on Android world?
This is interesting and welcome news.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Once again, I'm not saying that Nokia is in trouble: with their apparent migration towards Linux + Qt, they will be fine. I'm saying that open sourcing Symbian isn't likely to save it, and
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually Nokia used to use careful phrases like "Series 60 : Optimised for Symbian", implying that S60 could potentially run on other OSs.
Re: (Score:2)
Where? I can't find that phrase either on this page [trolltech.com] or this page [qtsoftware.com].
Re: (Score:2)
I strongly suspect that Nokia will be pushing Qt as the main toolkit/API for their [smart]phones, after which they will be free to dump the steaming pile that is Symbian and switch to Linux.
Yes, they are going to go through all the effort of porting Qt to Symbian only to ditch Symbian for Linux. Oh wait... Just because they are pushing out a few devices using Linux in no way means they are dropping Symbian.
Once again, I'm not saying that Nokia is in trouble: with their apparent migration towards Linux + Qt, they will be fine.
What apparent migration? Please provide any actual statements from Nokia that even remotely hint at them dropping Symbian to go all Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
Symbian has 49.5% ww smartphone market share (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Re: (Score:2)
Some moron in the Times (of London) annoyed me by saying "Windows Mobile, the operating system that runs on most smartphones...". He then later stated that it was Google Chrome that caused Microsoft to fix IE. Aaaaaaaaaaagh you're fired as technical editor.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When could I expect to run a custom firmware image on the Nokia N73, which runs S60 v3?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nokia phones are still proprietary hardware and even if they were to be able to run an open source symbian version (there isn't one yet), the adaptation layer is still not open source. Ignoring that, S60 itself isn't open source. Ignoring that, Nokia has always attempted to make custom firmware exceedingly difficult (storing flash images as partially encrypted to a specific asic ser
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but... which Symbian? What non-developers usually don't get is that currently Symbian is a lot like Linux - strictly speaking it's little more then an OS kernel with a bunch of low-level APIs. What users see, the GUI, is fragmented in the same way GNOME and KDE are fragmented, and with much worse results. The developers must build different versions of their application (UIQ, S60, others) for different devi
It is S60 V3 all over the place (Score:2)
Symbian World has settled on S60 V3 for a long time with the V5 (touch based) things getting popular for people using and enjoying a full touchscreen device. V3 and V5 doesn't differ too much.
Looking to future, it seems gaining a community&users with S60 V3 and keeping an eye open for Trolltech Qt UI makes sense. Of course one must not forget the Symbian handsets have surprisingly good, compatible J2ME with all kind of features you may want.
Qt will also bring discipline to scene. Obviously huge load of
Re: (Score:2)
We know. We make money on it. But even better is J2ME. Pretty much everything got it. Phones, PDAs, handheld consoles, in-car-systems, you name it. Sure "write once, run everywhere" is just true in theory, because the devices are different. But when you got your JSR-XXX APIs, it gets very close to it. You just have to be very flexible about the hardware caps, including keys, screen, memory, cpu power, sound mixer, etc.
Re:Okay... (Score:4, Informative)
and now that Android has arrived and brought a much more friendly programming environment, this step is too little, too late.
Too bad the figures don't bear you out what with Symbian powering almost 50% of all smart phones while Android is fighting to get more than 2-3% of the market. There are more Symbian-powered phones sold each quarter than there are even total devices running Android.
Parent
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Sorry, but me as a game designer am not going to invest development time into Android, because it is locked down. The same is even more true for the iPhone, that has not even got a JVM.
The Symbian API may be crappy, but it still is the best we got.
And from what I heard, we will soon have a new Qtopia stack and most importantly:
They want to make it open-source, so that they can use the benefits of all other open source projects, and integrate as much of them into Symbian, until it pretty much is a Linux-Symb
Decline of Windows Mobile? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
They run pretty well and sync up with software people use fairly easily, such as Outlook, etc. ?
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maybe because people will continue buying WinMobile handsets for the same reason they continue to buy Windows PCs?
Happily stopped purchasing Windows products over a year and a half ago, should have done it sooner. I am finding that in every category, even Graphics editing, Movie playing and mail / office apps, my FREEDOM with #Linux is superior than the limitations forced on me via vendor-lockin.
Remember, buy Linux PCs from a Vendor like ZaReason [zareason.com] that builds the PC, laptop, netbook, multi-media machine from the ground up with Linux in mind, thus no issues with anything, their Linux machines just work right out of the box.
When my friends could no longer reformat their PCs hard drive + reinstall their purchased Microsoft OS in order to clean out bloat and remove viruses, adware, etc, I just shook my head and reminded them why Microsoft lost my
Because you don't get kickbacks from OS (Score:2, Insightful)
With Symbian and Android now free, what is the reason for even producing a Windows Mobile handset anymore?
The Microsoft kickbacks, of course.
Otherwise you'd just run Android, I don't see the appeal of free Symbian myself when you could have something more modern and with better application potential.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And such thinking gave us the Year of the Linux desktop years ago! Oh wait... The licensing costs for WinMo are a pittance to the device manufacturers when it comes to the total cost to make the device especially since all the big phone companies definitely negotiate bulk license rates when dealing with Microsoft. If you honestly think these big phone manufacturers that rake in 10s of billions in revenue a year care about that mere pittance they throw to Microsoft for WinMo you are horrible naive. It's
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It is when they are selling most of those phones to the providers for 100s of dollars a piece.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What was great about Windows Mobile before? That you could get cracked more easily? That it ate all the power and your battery died after 2 hours? Or that it was more expensive and buggy? ^^
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Easy-to-use development tools, and, as a consequence, a wide selection of third-party non-toy applications.
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Hmm, I found development for Symbian pretty easy. So I really must have a different understanding of "easy". :)
But I prefer "efficient" over "easy" anyway.
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"Easy" in this case means "so easy a monkey could do it": if you target .NET Compact Framework, you fire up VS, create a new "Smart Device" project, and immediately see a visual form editor where you can drag widgets around and hook up events; then press F5, and the emulator will automatically be launched, your application built and deployed, and debugging starts.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In what way is Symbian a failure? It seems to be on an awful lot more mobiles than WinMo.
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This is the one big reason why Symbian is such a failure.
I wish I could be as big of a failure as Symbian where in around 18 million phones per quarter are sold with it installed and it holds 50% of the smart phone OS market.
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Symbian? (Score:2, Funny)
Symbian vs. Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Is that even true? If not, we should take it up on the discussion page.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Well it's sort of irrelevant now. Most phone chipsets have two ARM cores - one for the signalling and one for the application.
And as someone put it if you're developing a phone do you really want to deal with bugs like "when I play this Britney Spears MP3 my phone drops calls" or worse "phone fails radio test at the testhouse, seems to depend which application is running but we can't figure out how".
If you put both the applications and the signalling stack on the same ARM you're pretty much asking for this.
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My phone doesn't play MP3s while I'm trying to talk to someone.
Psion Calendar in SymbianOS? (Score:3, Informative)
Precursor to Symbian the Psion OS had Calendar.app superior over todays calendar apps.
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The PalmOS calendar was also superior to anything I've seen on any of the smart phones I've looked at. It boggles the mind that we could have gone so far backwards on such a basic core feature.
EPL/GPL compatibility (Score:2)
According to this [wikipedia.org] EPL and GPL are incompatible due to diferening patent restrictions, however if there are no patents covering the code (or the patents are invalid), could the code be linked and redistributed under either
Symbian Android (Score:2)
Do we care? (Score:2)
No, really.. with all that is out there now is this that big of a deal? Perhaps it is, which is why i ask.
Re: (Score:2)
Look to N97 and aging E90. They all belong to 9000 family of Nokia which is particularly interesting since the user base of them are following the incarnation of the models. E.g. 9200 users moved to 9300, 9300 moved to E90 and they now consider N97. It is almost like iPod community.
Nokia has been making true netbooks for almost a decade while nobody seems to care. It started with Psion in fact, grandfather of Symbian.
Of course, Nokia was never stupid to think that users would want a non performing Windows o
Re: (Score:2)
It's there - called Raptor. We haven't done gcc-e support yet but its coming soon. You can set up a cliuster of Linux machines and run it on them to speed up your builds
(I am a Nokia employee - sorry if it's not proper Slashdot etiquette to post like this.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry - I realise that I was assuming you meant a Symbian dev environment for Linux. Anyhow there is one and it's getting lots of effort poured into it.