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Symbian Foundation Sites To Close
Following news earlier this month that Nokia is taking back control of Symbian platform development, the Symbian Foundation has now announced that its websites will shut down on December 17th. Source repositories will no longer be hosted online, and user-submitted content databases may be available later upon request.
"We are working hard to make sure that most of the content accessible through web services (such as the source code, kits, wiki, bug database, reference documentation & Symbian Ideas) is available in some form, most likely on a DVD or USB hard drive upon request to the Symbian Foundation. Preparing this content will take some time, hence it will not be distributable before 31st January 2011. A charge may be levied for media and shipping.
The foundation already had membership fees which got in the way and phones are not an area where people can hack away in a completely unrestrained manner anyhow, in general, since it is possible to make devices behave illegally and damage/DOS networks if they are modified. People do this of course but I can't imagine a device manufacturer sanctioning it or indeed aiding it in any way. So it's not an area that's particularly amenable to open source. Also look at how long it took Linux to even establish it's ecosystem - I was using it in 1992 when I left school. The Symbian Foundation had barely any chance.
Android et al have non-phone applicability at the moment (which Symbian actually has too but it's unexploited e.g. it can run on X86) and share software that is not phone-specific so there are more avenues for it to pick up outside changes from. I wonder how many people successfully submit things that get into the core of Android outside normal fixes to packages from upstream?
The Symbian Kernel is actually the most worthwhile bit of it - it's very nicely designed and is good at power management - something that Linux is still primitive at. *All* OS calls are asynchronous and that's just something that really makes me love it as a programmer - Linux is shit in this sense that a mere file IO command is guaranteed to block your process. You are a Linux fan so it seems like it has all the answers to you but you must intellectually admit that that isn't likely and that in OS kernels as in science, different people have parts of the answer. I'm writing this on my Linux laptop, I am ready to give everyone their due.
The real issue is that open source stuff doesn't just suddenly happen, and Nokia, the biggest contributor of code, didn't work in a very open or agile way inside and didn't use the SF in the way it's supposed to be used - as the master repository. So the level of interaction wasn't there. But this kind of thing happens when you get a whole lot of people who might have read open source books but have not actually tried any of it out before, try to "do open source". They just make all the obvious mistakes and 75% don't change the way they work at all since they don't understand how.
Despite all this there were modders like HyperX who produced updates for the Samsung i8910 long after they gave up on it. This trend will only increase. Symbian Foundation or not, the code is still there and AFAIK will still be offered openly.