Slashdot Mirror
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.
Symbian is dead. No need to wait for Netcraft to confirm it.
How will this affect the high-end adult toy industry?
Unless they serve it from a ROM based source there's always the chance of the server getting hacked and the content altered or defaced.
You could always buy an N900 or the forthcoming Meego phone. They run pretty standard GNU/Linux distributions.
the source code [...] is available in some form, most likely on a DVD
I don't see how this makes Symbian not free software. Anyone can buy a copy of the source code on DVD for $10 or so and host a mirror. Such was the Free Software Foundation's business model in the early days.
And considering market share the one is Symbian. doing better than all others. And as long as Android comes only in 2 form factors I both don't like (touch screen only and touch screen with retractable keyboard) I stick to Symbian which brings out devices without fingerprint-prone screens (aka touchscreen) and fixed keyboards like my E51 and E72.
You must be in the US, in the UK wondering into my town centre I can put my hands on it in a O2 store and a Carphone Warehouse.
For an idea of it works try the N8, the interfaces are very similar however the N900 is quicker and the interface is better (think the best parts of Andriod added in). I had a quick look online and the video found here gives a pretty good impression of how it works.
The only downside is it is a heavy phone. For comparison I have a Nokia 5800 the N900 is slightly larger and noticeably heavier.
I'm pretty sure that this is the software-industry equivalent of taking a body home for a closed-casket funeral.
Ummm, a policy of distribution, on request, for no more than a reasonable cost recovery fee, is actually explicitly GPL compatible(and I'm not aware, offhand, of any reasonably common "free software" license that does specify http rather than fedex). Legally, a change from having a website to distributing dumps of the backups on request makes no difference at all.
De-facto, of course, seeing as web pages(along with things like torrents if you really have no bandwidth money and big files to move) are by far the most convenient and cheap means of distributing code and facilitating its open development, pulling the site down typically announces an intention to quietly move to a "legally open, in practice closed consortium that the unwashed can visit if they fill out a request in triplicate six months in advance" or (as is not wholly implausible with symbian) just take the project out back and shoot it. From a "free software" perspective, a move away from the overwhelmingly easiest way to run a project openly certainly doesn't scream "team player"; but it isn't a legally salient move.
One has to wonder if Nokia really knows where it's going.
It's going to MeeGo. As I understand it, Symbian is just the legacy system that Nokia uses on "feature phones" until MeeGo matures.
Kernel drivers are free -- not all are present in vanilla kernels, but the patches are available. The non-free stuff that is important includes hardware acceleration for the display (not strictly vital) and a tiny little detail that is battery charging -- both live in the userspace.
Other non-free bits on N900 are parts of Maemo which is on the way out -- you don't need them if you want a replacement. Any new systems would be most likely based on Meego (like the current Debian project is).
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
No it doesn't. Just that they won't host, administer and pay for all the functionality around it if no-one is going to use it anyway.
You can still get the source code. Obviously.
Lots of work for nothing.
Regarding Android I have no idea how accessible it is. Most of the phones seems rather locked down anyway.
Wait for the Nexus Two in that case. Personally I want a MeeGo phone. And if I had to get something now I guess it would be either a cheap second hand (eventually still new) N900 or the E7 once released but I'd much rather wait for MeeGo. But it will most likely take forever.
Not like I've got anything to call anyway.
Something with no voice possibility and all wireless network and portability would do to. People could phone by over IP.
Or, look at it this way: Symbian device sales were up 61% year-on-year in Q3 2010, and 320,000 people per day chose a Symbian smartphone in Q3 2010.
Market share isn't everything - look no further than Apple. The market as a whole is clearly growing - in Symbian's case, the lower hardware requirements mean the smartphone experience is being pushed down the market to what would previously have been considered "feature phones".
Pick the right tool for the right job. Symbian was designed from the word go to run on battery-powered devices. UNIX and Linux were not, and consequently power management is largely bolted on. Given the same battery, Symbian will run a phone for longer than iOS or Android. The tradeoff to this is that you must write your code in a very esoteric way. That is not what the "app console" market wants today, which is why Nokia brought Qt to Symbian.
I was one of a series strategic consultants hired when Symbian was considering conversion to an Open Source project. Unfortunately, what I told them was not what they wanted to hear. One element I pushed was that nobody was going to be interested in their kernel, regardless of what they did, and that conversion to Linux would eventually be necessary if they were not to continue to expend millions on re-inventing the wheel. Another element was licensing and strategy so that the project would continue to make money, which, amazingly, was rejected as Symbian's customers were also its owners and didn't care for it to continue as a for-profit project. Rather than the direction they took, I would have preferred to see them continue to operate as a profitable proprietary software company, because they very obviously weren't going to make it in Open Source.
But in truth, this project started too late to have much hope.
Bruce Perens.
Growth in number of units shiped is biggest for Symbian. Everything else is deceiving when players have so wildly different installed bases.
Pundits in few atypical (but highly vocal) places few years ago, when smartphone market was sitting at around 15%, were making prophecies of explosive growth of smartphone segment - so that we should be at half by now. It's around 20% of total, maybe not even above as of yet.
Impressive growth percentages of smartphones don't mention the growth of the total mobile phone market. Also $20 phones. So called "feature phones" mostly (many with more capabilities than iPhone for most of the time...) - and while I can see efforts to redefine Symbian as "not really smartphone", it doesn't change how it will be widely used.
Daily (often bi-daily, for Androids, from what I can see...) recharging of phone is not so straightforward for a lot of people BTW.
Regarding developers - so, tell me, how many of those thousands apps are UIs for single web pages, single e-books and audiobooks or UIs for radio stations? Look at what is used on the desktop. There is something like "enough" here...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Series 30 (or Series 40 which is 30 with Java more or less) was a great OS. In fact, there probably never was or will be a telephone OS that can be brought up on a new platform as fast as 30 or 40 could be.
Symbian was a "good, we found something other than Microsoft" solution. A Series 60 phone can run on 33Mhz with 2 megs of RAM. Yes, I know, Linux can theoretically do that too. But Linux does NOT have a good out of memory handling strategy... well neither does Symbian, but the crap design of Symbian otherwise actually makes it quite suitable for these 2 megabyte platforms.
Symbian apps are all designed from the ground up to suck for almost all purposes, but not to crash on low memory. You spend 90% of your programming time on Symbian trying to figure out how to use the string class because just saying String A= String B take 10 lines of code. And that's because every line of a Symbian app is designed to take low memory into consideration.
Linux is NOT suited for that and anyone who would suggest doing such a horrible thing to Linux as has been done to Symbian should be shot just for making such a bad suggestion.
A Nokia Series 60 phone is a phone containing the absolute least expensive components possible. Occasionally you get lucky and they'll use an 8meg RAM chip instead of a 4meg RAM chip because they found out that if they spent $0.04 more for it, they could save $0.05 on a cheaper battery as the 8meg chip was processed at 45nm instead of 65nm.
Additionally, Nokia can brag to the press that they're the #1 smart phone vendor in the world because 90% of their phones are shipping with a Smart Phone OS. It makes it so people will still believe that one day Nokia might actually be able to make a real smart phone that people might actually not think sucks.
Nokia might want to have the coolest high end smart phone on the planet for marketing purposes, but they're going to sell 100,000 of them at $500 profit (on components) each. On the other hand, they'll sell 100,000,000 series 60 phones at $10 profit on each during that same period.
To make Linux fit on that cheapy device, they'd have to rewrite every single app. The only actual Linux component would be the kernel itself and that will be instrumented from hell to high water to do things like signal when this thing is low on memory. Or shutdown this subsystem when that app needs a little more RAM. blah blah blah.
Linux is the wrong operating system for this. Even if it were the right operating system for Nokia, it's the wrong application for the Linux world in general.