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Symbian Foundation Takes First Step In Open Sourcing Mobile OS

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the many-options-to-play-with dept.

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."

23 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. get rid of symbian signed.. by mehrotra.akash · · Score: 2, Insightful

    whats the point of this if all apps need to be signed by an external authority?

    1. Re:get rid of symbian signed.. by martok · · Score: 2, 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?

    2. Re:get rid of symbian signed.. by davester666 · · 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.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  2. Okay... by rumith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Okay... by SpinyNorman · · Score: 4, 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/

      Note that Qt is an entire cross-platform library, not just for GUI - it includes stuff like threads, network comms, XML even WebKit!

    2. Re:Okay... by Freetardo+Jones · · Score: 2, Informative

      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

    3. Re:Okay... by Freetardo+Jones · · Score: 3, 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.

  3. Decline of Windows Mobile? by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

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    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:Decline of Windows Mobile? by Aphonia · · Score: 2, Informative

      They run pretty well and sync up with software people use fairly easily, such as Outlook, etc. ?

    2. Re:Decline of Windows Mobile? by cyber-vandal · · Score: 2, Informative

      In what way is Symbian a failure? It seems to be on an awful lot more mobiles than WinMo.

    3. Re:Decline of Windows Mobile? by Freetardo+Jones · · Score: 2, 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 the same reason why all the nerd rage over the licensing costs of H.264 or MP3 etc is meaningless to any major device manufacturer as it's a mere pittance to their bottom line.

    4. Re:Decline of Windows Mobile? by Hurricane78 · · Score: 2, 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? ^^

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
  4. Right by Colin+Smith · · Score: 2, 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.

     

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    1. Re:Right by rumith · · Score: 2, Interesting
      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 probably isn't even intended to.

    2. Re:Right by Hal_Porter · · 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.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  5. Symbian? by GottliebPins · · Score: 2, Funny

    So this is a portable version of that vibrating thing? Oh, sorry, never mind...

  6. Symbian has 49.5% ww smartphone market share by MagicMerl · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:Symbian has 49.5% ww smartphone market share by migla · · Score: 2, Interesting

      When could I expect to run a custom firmware image on the Nokia N73, which runs S60 v3?

      --
      Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
    2. Re:Symbian has 49.5% ww smartphone market share by ivoras · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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 devices, and the users cannot simply install "the other one" enabling them to run applications written for other devices. If someone says to you that there's an application doing X "for Symbian", you better pray it's for your specific little version of Symbian. If you a have Nokia device and the app is for Sony Ericsson, you're simply out of luck and there is no way to run the app on your device.

      And then there are other stupid mistakes, of which the worst one is having to license your app with Symbian foundation (or whoever) to be able to install it on other devices. Imagine if you developed a Windows application (of which, note, there are gazillions today) and have to pay Microsoft for the privilege of being able to install it on other people's devices. Not going to work, is it? All other modern platforms either don't have this kind of "protection" at all (Windows Mobile, Android) or have it in a much less obtrusive way (iPhone, Pre).

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      -- Sig down
    3. Re:Symbian has 49.5% ww smartphone market share by duranaki · · Score: 2, Informative

      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 serial number for instance).. of course that may no longer be true. If the encryption is no longer required in the Nokia hardware, then I suppose custom images might be possible by altering binary components in the image. But I hardly think you should 'expect' it to happen.

  7. Symbian vs. Linux by lixee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Res publica non dominetur
    1. Re:Symbian vs. Linux by Hal_Porter · · 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. I'd much rather have say a small ARM9 core and a beefier ARM11 for the application.

      The ARM9 doesn't take up much space and you can give it priority access to external flash/sdram and try to run parts of the radio stack as possible from tightly coupled memory, i.e. on die SRAM. That makes it more or less a different machine and minimizes the chance of application code sabotaging the radio. Plus you can run a tiny OS kernel designed for network stacks on the ARM9 and Linux/WinMo/Android or whatever on the ARM11.

      And when the phone is in not running applications but needs to stay connected to the network you can shutdown the power hungry application core and the flash, run the ARM9 at a low clock frequency, put the SDRAM in self refresh and have the network stack do its thing mostly low power TCM and cache.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  8. Psion Calendar in SymbianOS? by ElitistWhiner · · Score: 2, Informative

    Precursor to Symbian the Psion OS had Calendar.app superior over todays calendar apps.