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Symbian Completes Transition To Open Source
Grond writes "Symbian, maker of the the world's most popular mobile operating system, has completed the transition to a completely open platform months ahead of schedule. While the kernel was opened up last year, the entire platform is now open source, primarily under the Eclipse Public License. A FAQ is available with more information about the platform opening."
Adds an anonymous reader, linking to PC Magazine's story on the transition: "By putting Symbian fully in the public domain, the Symbian Foundation is pitting it against Google's Android. Symbian is well known across most of the world, but it's mostly a foreign curiosity in the US, AT&T is the only carrier that currently has a symbian phone in its lineup, the Nokia E71x."
Since Nokia is phone manufacturer itself and main supporter of Symbian, I really hope they open source their drivers for different phones too. Nokia is already moving in that direction with Qt and it doesn't impact their main business as a phone manufacturer. Only problem would be if those drivers use licensed patents from other manufacturers though.
Android being open source is practically useless because you cannot get drivers for any phone. Sure you can see the OS code and tinker around it (if you are able to get overly complex development environment set up), but you are unable to use it on your phone or do pretty much anything with it. It's only good for phone manufacturers.
If Nokia also were to release drivers for their phones, this would be huge victory against Android.
A entire OS and IDE for a glorified vibrator seems like overkill if you ask me.
Except they didn't, in any sense of the term, put it in the public domain.
If it's so freakin' open please tell me why I still need to have apps signed on my Nokia 6220 classic and will do for the foreseeable future unless I'm willing to try risky hacks.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Placing code under an open-source license is not the same as putting it in the "public domain". Code under an open source license still has conditions attached to it (even if minimal ones) while code placed in the public domain has no restrictions placed on it of any sort. Code under an open-source license is still copyrighted, but with a permissive license that allows one to do some things normally reserved only for the work's copyright holder. By contrast, a work in the public domain is not covered by copyright law at all.
It's even Linux. Hell, it's Debian.
http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/
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AT&T's customized version of Symbian on the E71x sucks eggs. They have taken away a lot of the great features of Symbian, such as the ability to use the Ovi store, Nokia maps, and simple things like the ability to set up an imap mail account. It's like At&t was paid off by Blackberry to make Symbain a failure in the US smartphone market. I've worked around most of these limitations on my device, but would be interested to know if announcement might lead to the ability to reload the E71x's firmware with a stock Symbian build.
AT&T also has the Nokia Mural.... doesn't this also run the Symbian OS?
According to the FAQ you can now get all the source and can (at least theoretically) build the OS and various applications. Groovy.
Setting aside the fact that just building all of the pieces is complicated (see the FAQ), and also setting aside the fact that many phones will refuse to run homemade, un-signed builds, you might run into issues with patents:
Having the source under an open license is just one step on the path to personal control over your phone and freedom to use, share, and modify the software running on it.
coding is life
cuz i sure did.
Yeah but, what an alibi!
"Boss, I tell ya! I'm just searching for documentation to do my job as a Symbian developer and all this porn comes up! I'm sorry, but it just happens!"
You install the app signer which has a dev cert. Then you can sign and install any application you want, a bit of a pain, but no risky hacks required.
http://thesymbianblog.com/2009/07/04/how-to-sign-unsigned-files-on-a-s60-3rd5th-edition-device-itself/
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Nokia has Maemo as well, which is better than Android in so many ways. Try a N900 and you will see. There is no reason for them to go Android,
Now the world has gone to bed, Darkness won't engulf my head, I can see by infra-red, How I hate the night.
Last time I checked for a simple way to develop small symbian apps under Linux it was a painful experience: nearly uninstallable toolchains and SDK, version conflicts etc. And under Windows everything was $$$. I hope this will allow the creation of better free tools.
I personally blame the Internet and rule 34.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
how can Microsoft sell their windows mobile OS now?
good riddance to it and them.
Nokia will be forced to adopt Android shortly I think (year or two). There's only room for one other player I think, but I'm pretty sure it's Windows Mobile (though force of will) or PalmOS
On my Nokia E71 I have Nokia Maps and Google Maps, I have Gizmo SIP VoIP and Skype, I have virtual assistant call manager software, I have ssh and irc clients, I have msn/icq client, and I can turn it into a wifi hotspot. I can run any application anybody has written for the device. If the choice becomes Android, Windows, or iPhone, then I'm not upgrading until they turn off the last GSM base station.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Feature phones will be gone by the time anyone does anything with this. The iPhone form factor is clearly where all phones are going because the screen supports the Web. If you're going to support the Web, you need Unix. Fixing Symbian to be modern should have happened a long time ago if at all.
These hardware companies are getting killed by Apple because Apple is a software company. They spend much more time designing the software interactions than the physical hardware, which they reduce as far as possible to keep it out of the way of the software. My Apple Logic Studio is bigger than all of my other apps combined by about 10 times and costs $100 per year to stay current. Apple layers on the software, their devices do much more because they have software resources that completely outclass the competition. The software community already gave Nokia free Unix, they should be building on top of that. Nobody cares what kernel is in their phone, they care that it surfs the Web, is fast, doesn't stall, is easy to use.
It seems that Nokia is positively moving towards oss lately. I certainly did not expect Nokia to be first to ship smartphones with a very compatible Linux distribution and root access out of the box.
Mozilla has no plans to ever bring Firefox Mobile to it. :/
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
If the choice becomes Android, Windows, or iPhone, then I'm not upgrading until they turn off the last GSM base station.
Phillip.
I don't see Windows in that future at all. Not that I'm anti-MS, it's just that WinMobo is a massive flop, and now that HTC (THE COMPANY behind the PDA-phone aka touchscreen smartphone concept, and almost all of those shitty winmobo bricks) has got an alternative to base theirs and their OEM phones on, I can't see much life in WinMobo unles MS itself begins ordering HTC OEM phones. Android's got more press than Iphone nowdays, and HPs, Docomos and Oranges of the world will soon figure out which way to go. MS simply missed that train.
It also has a large installed base, and it runs on much more pathetic hardware than android or maemo.
There's still a marketplace for phones that aren't 1GHz, yet do more than talk and text. I don't know how many millions of phones out there run S60...
Oh - they'll never adopt android, they have the superior Maemo for phones/tablets with some actual horsepower.
Sent from my PDP-11
So... Does this mean we can go in and fix their bluetooth drivers? Especially for communications with older model car kits?
We can't talk about Symbian OS without a link to:
http://www.sybian.com/
Symbian must be one of the worst designed OSs in existance
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/6856C375-FE4E-4BC8-B753-B48AF3BD8B30.html
The massive series of apps and developer support that's growing around Android will probably push Maemo out of the market.
Except for the fact that the n900 uses a resistive screen, as where the Droid uses a capacitave screen. Droid has way more apps available for it. Masses will chose Droid imo.
I don't know how many millions of phones out there run S60...
About 330 Million worldwide, according to Symbian - out of those, at least 100M were sold in the last 18 months so are likely to still be in use.
I did not even know that a saddle/vibrator with that name existed, before I read your post.
Just think how much easier it would be if the company had called themselves "Saddle plus Vibrator", "Saddle-ator", or "Vibraddle". Heck, I think we'd still get the picture if they were "Unicorn (Uniporn?) Saddles, Unlimited".
And so do, I guess, 99.999% of the population. ^^
So sad... maybe people would be happier if they knew about it.
coding is life
"getting killed by Apple"
It's amazing how much Apple fanboys love to use hyperboles.
Code under an open-source license is still copyrighted, but with a permissive license that allows one to do some things normally reserved only for the work's copyright holder. By contrast, a work in the public domain is not covered by copyright law at all.
Actually PD is covered by copyright law: It's free to modify it and assert a copyright on the "derived work" cwith the full set of copyright restrictions. Ditto to combine it with other works - PD or not - and copyright the collection.
What this means for software is that if you PD it:
- Somebody else can fix a bug or add a feature, copyright the fixed version, and then NOBODY ELSE, including YOU, can fix that bug or add that feature in YOUR version.
- Somebody can make a distribution consisting of your PD software combined with that of others, copyright THAT, and then NOBODY ELSE, including YOU and the rest of the authors of the pieces, can produce a distribution structured like the copyrighted one.
So the open source licenses generally retain copyright over the original work and require the additions to be made open (for some value of open) as well, as "payment" for using the underlying work. Some of them also try to more things (like push for as much software as possible to be opened), but this is the main point.
If copyright wasn't applicable to software the open source licenses wouldn't be needed to defend against these threats. (We'd lose the requirement for the source to go out, but gain the ability to reverse-engineer everything and publish the "recovered source".)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
[...]Droid has way more apps available for it.[...]
uh, what? Maemo is a Debian-based Linux. There is no sandbox runtime or anything, it's pretty much a standard Linux. Which means you can install a lot of the applications you could install on any generic Linux box. So I highly doubt that there are more apps for Android than there are for Maemo.
Symbian is well known across most of the world, but it's mostly a foreign curiosity in the US. AT&T is the only carrier that currently has a symbian phone in its lineup, the Nokia E71x.
There've been Symbian phones in the US for at least 7 years now - I had a Nokia 3650 back in the early days. And back then, compared to what else was out there, it was pretty cool. Compared to what's out there now? Not so much.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
So by that logic, the iPhone OS is pushing Android out of the market?
The massive series of apps and developer support that's growing around Android will probably push Maemo out of the market.
Yes. Because there are no apps for Debian.
"getting killed by Apple" It's amazing how much Apple fanboys love to speak in hyperbole.
nothing to see there
Symbian's a dead end. Maemo/Android/Linux is the way going forward. I've been a long time Nokia fan, I make no bones about it. I can call them out when they screw up, but generally I find their products superior. I've used a number of Symbian phones, and two Maemo devices, the N810 Internet Tablet and the new N900 phone. The N810 was a great device, and the N900 blows away any handheld device I've used. The ease of use, the ability to customize, hack, the ease of getting applications, everything is just so much better on the N900 than any Symbian device I've ever had. Symbian is an aging platform that hasn't worn well over time. It's time to let it die.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I am biased as I work "with it" every day.
It's written in C++ and the syscalls are asynchronous by default (very very nice when you're doing lots of comms). It has a microkernel and an extremely comprehensive api. It's even written in C++. The kernel is actually quite nice.
So *actually* Linux is a dinosaur by comparison if you consider modern-ness to be of any importance.
I don't but and I like linux a lot but Symbian is an operating system that deserves respect and it's dumb to believe that everything has to be done "one true way". The user-level programming experience is not nice due to the great efforts made to fit it onto early phone hardware (since it has been out there long before 600Mhz ARM chips arrived that could shift the weight of Linux or OSX).
But all of that's changing and as a result of pretty gargantuan efforts that few pundits have any appreciation of that this rough diamond is being cut and will dazzle.
This is all just my personal opinion.
Except for the fact that the n900 uses a resistive screen, as where the Droid uses a capacitave screen.
Which basically means that N900 screen is more precise, and can be operated with gloves on, or with a stylus (think handwriting input), while Droid cannot.
Oh, but Droid can do multitouch! Except... no stock applications support it, anyway.
D'oh.
I'm not sure there's much evidence that Nokia are losing any ground? For last quarter of 2009, their sales were up 22%, their profits almost doubled, and their market share increased to 39%; in the "smartphone" market, their share increased from 35% to 40% .
The "big names" you mention are still niche players in the phone market (except perhaps RIM; admittedly they should also worrying about Android, not because of Google phones directly, but because the rest of the phone manufacturers such as Motorola may switch to Android; but Apple are a non-issue here).
URL says it all:
http://www.slutload.com/watch/qgREWYjJQW/Sexy-girl-stuffs-cell-phone-up-her-pussy-WOW.html
Rule 34 indeed...
(obviously NSFW)
Nokia make specific hardware with a very modern phoneOS. My 5800 does things the Iphone can't do, and at a fraction of the price - hell, even my old Motorola V980 could! And it's easy to use. Maybe there are some things an Apple phone does that no Nokia phone does, but the reverse is also true.
If you reply, let's have evidence and specific examples of how the Iphone is better than all other phones; not simply assertions that the Iphone is the Best Ever.
Apple is a software company.
Really?
See http://images.betanews.com/media/3620.png or some article at http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-Q3-2009-by-the-numbers/1248218543 (which got data from Apple's SEC filings).
From 2009, software was ~500 megabucks, iPods ~1500, iPhones ~1700, music ~1000. Also Desktops ~1130 and Portables (Laptopts?) ~2200.
Apple sells computers and consumer electronics (~tied first place). Then music. Then software at a quite distant third.
If you measure by sales, Apple is not a software company.
Then again, Apple probably ships software on each of their hardware devices, so by unit count... well... just like how Vader betrayed and murdered Luke's father, you can get the conclusion you want if you look at reality from a certain point of view that's particularly supportive of your interpretation.
My current N97 has 128Mb of RAM and 30+Gb of storage on board.
It browses web pages fine, plays music, videos, sends video emails and calls, has gps and maps and it lasts up to 3 days on a battery charge.
The maemo N900 has 256Mb of RAM, 600MHz CPU. As fast and powerful and as handy with Linux on board as it is, do you think the battery life is going to last 3 days?
If you want an embedded platform where the costs and specific performance criteria are important, e.g. making profit selling hardware, the OS requirements can make a huge difference to the bottom line. Developers... Well battery life is only important to their wives and storage comes in terabytes.
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HEY HEY 16K, Need To Know, Thursday (Big K) — Nokia, through the Symbian Foundation, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS open source, putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight.
"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."
The Foundation hopes to pit Symbian against Windows Mobile. "There's no way it can compete against our superior features, like WAP browsing, infrared connect to your laptop and, of course, the serial port." It also hopes to set the stage for a march on the USA. "The Americans will fall before our superior engineering! Psion worked on the ZX81, you know.
There are currently about 330 million Symbian devices in the world, at least fifteen of whose owners can actually use the web browser without wanting to throw the phone through a window. "Just think," said Berkin, "anyone can improve their phone! Well, they could if Nokia made phones the user could flash. But still!"
The Foundation issued a press release about how the open-sourcing of Symbian was welcomed by free software advocates and other aging hippies. "Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian," said Eben Moglen, "to hack on it, and to write applications for it. This could be even bigger than the Amiga."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
How many Debian apps are tailored for a phone that a normal consumer will use?
Seriously, we all know how cool Maemo is and how outdated Symbian is. More FOSS out in the wild is still a *good thing*. There are still millions of Symbian devices out there, and plenty of people who would like to hack/improve them. This seems similar to Netscape's move to open up their code, which ultimately gave us all that Mozilla goodness. So, you never know, this could turn out quite well for the FOSS community, even though we all know it's a desperate move and many of us aren't all that interested because we can get our hands on cooler toys.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Maemo and Android don't really compete in the same markets (yet). You can use either to accomplish many of the same tasks, but while Android is a great phone and java execution environment, Maemo is a desktop OS (Linux + GNU + X11) with small-screen widgets. The latest Maemo device (the n900) happens to have a phone onboard, but it's almost periphery.
I strongly suspect that someone will build a nice clean Android environment for Maemo soon, and the point will be moot. If you want an easy-to-use smartphone, buy Android. If you want a pocket computer with radios onboard (the real future, I believe), go Maemo.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Except for the fact that the n900 uses a resistive screen, as where the Droid uses a capacitave screen.
Which basically means that N900 screen is more precise, and can be operated with gloves on, or with a stylus (think handwriting input), while Droid cannot.
Oh, but Droid can do multitouch! Except... no stock applications support it, anyway.
D'oh.
It actually comes with a stylus, which is very useful for high precision stuff (e.g. clicking on links in the browser if you can't be bothered zooming in). It also has the advantage of not leaving your screen covered in fingerprints. It's also ideal for handwriting recognition, although the N900 doesn't have that (yet).
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
Symbian has classicaly made use of the most complex build environment of any system. In the old days they lacked any GCC expertise so instead chose to "post process" elf files output by the compiler to hack them to work with their application loader which is more of a shared library loader than an application loader.
Things haven't improved over time. Their build environments and formats are still an utter disaster. Their hacks to Eclipse are half assed at best as well.
The only way Symbian will ever compete with Android is if the community works like the Netscape community did when it went open... rewrite the thing since it's pretty much crap from the bottom up.
Sometimes you can ship relatively good products even if they are built as a mountain of dung. The trick is to stick a pretty box around it. But if anyone ever takes enough interest in this OS when there are so many MUCH better alternatives out there, it's going to get rewritten if for consistency and modernization if nothing else.
Who the hell ever heard of an OS that DEMANDS you use a programming model like MVC (and a misinterpretation of it as well) just to write a hello world program. Coding for this thing is painful at best.
That's what I wished for in 2001. If it happened then, the world of mobile OS would be different. I think it is too late to save Symbian now.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13186&cid=92580
)9TSS
well... to be completely honest: the N900 isn't really for the "normal consumer", is it? At least not yet. But I have two friends who own one and they run pretty much everything on there. From Pidgin to Duke Nukem 3D. And the screen is 800x480, so at least in respect to window dimensions you wouldn't have to tailor that much.
You are vastly underestimating Nokia and Maemo. As another poster has already mentioned, once Nokia moves past their current Symbian (cash cow) vs. Maemo (new kid) stage and puts their full weight behind Maemo, Maemo will become a dominant player in the smartphone market. I have no doubt of this.
Believing that Nokia will not succeed is a very limited US-centric view. True, they are just not as strong a player in the US as in the rest of the world. But, remember that Nokia still has the most market share worldwide, far, far more than Android/Google or Apple today. While certainly the "A" teams are growing, they have a long way to go to even begin to compete with the installed base of Nokia. And consider that innovation from Nokia is starting to pick up steam again, especially in the smartphone market outside the US.
Symbian will be replaced by Maemo in the high end smartphone market. I've owned many Symbian based phones over the years and generally they have worked well, although sometimes the UI has been a little slow. I don't dislike Symbian, but I believe it's nearing the end of it's useful life when considering the possibilities of Linux-based Maemo.
Mod parent +1
The last time I saw figures for smartphone and indeed normal mobile phone share in the world, the USA was lagging behind greatly. With APAC and Europe far in the lead, the USA accounts for less than 10% of the market despite being one of the main world super powers.
This probably relates to sparse spreading of the population, making cell towers hard to locate, and a mix of conflicting technologies, include expensive legacy tech that the companies running, refuse to let go of. So the USA not having heard of Nokia/Symbian isn't even important and also explains why with almost nobody using Symbian in the states, Symbian is the main smartphone OS.
I'm a Brit but work for a US company, and it saddens me to see them lose sight on which platforms to develop on, focusing on Android and iPhoneOS despite relatively low update outside of America. Sure they're nice platforms, but frankly Maemo is better and easier to develop for and yet they're not bothering.
As an aside, and a bit off topic, I am interested in the AndroidExecutionEnvironment that was being developed for Ubuntu. A (hopefully) simple port to maemo would mean I could still run my favourite Android apps.
Huge big up for this. If the Android-Phone users can install Debian along their main OS, it's a shame that users of Maemo, Angstrom, OpenMoko, etc. can't do the other way arround.
Extra Bonus Points if it works in WebOS too !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I have a N900 'phone. I love it - basically it is Linux in your pocket, with proper web browsing and a telephone. I think anyone who works with computers should consider looking into buying one.
However, as a "business" 'phone it sucks. The basic requirements of a business 'phone are:
1) Push e-mail with integrated spellcheck (you don't want typos in the e-mail back to the boss or important client)
2) Easy to use calendar (which syncs with desktop data)
3) Easy to use address book (which syncs with desktop data)
4) Easy to use 'phone (one-handed dialing, quick-lookup in address book, etc.)
The N900 does not compete well with either the Blackberry here, and to a lesser degree the iPhone. Fix those four points and the N900 becomes a serious contender for a business phone (since the business can install any damn application on the device).
Also, the Ovi Maps application for the N900 is currently underpar - hopefully this will improve later this year.
I really hope Maemo takes off. This is the platform for Slashdot readers. The N900 is a great device to tinker with.
It's only good for phone manufacturers.