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Nokia Confirms Symbian Is No Longer Open Source
theweatherelectric noted an article on the H. From the article "Nokia has confirmed that it has closed the source code for the Symbian smartphone operating system. It says that despite it describing its new model for Symbian smartphone operating system development as 'open and direct' the 'open' part did not refer to 'open source' but to being 'open for business'. The 'open and direct' model is designed, according to Nokia, to 'enable us to continue working with the remaining Japanese OEMs and the relatively small community of platform development collaborators we are already working with.''"
Are they still around?
OK stop.
I get it.
Some asshole said he was "open"
but he was only open for business
Anyone remember this lyrics segment from one of the OpenBSD release songs (a bonus track)
It's sad that what's a joke one day becomes reality in few years
Next is Qt.
Symbian division is gonna be shutdown within the next 2 - 3 years. What's the point of closing it now?
Really, I like KDE. I like QT. I'm started to feel like Nokia is becoming something awful. I hope that if anything happens, KDE has enough developer power to keep QT going.
Yeah, I know: this is about Symbian, but really, does anyone think that Nokia is going to be working towards an Open (Source, not business) future?
What did Microsoft with Nokia? :(
Nokia Exec: "We're Open and direct"
Slashdot BS filter: We're open, like Goatse. And direct, like flying chairs.
Goodbye Symbian, Goodbye QT, Goodbye Nokia. Everyone start migrating now, the borg are about to swallow it all.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This is exactly what happens when a Microsoft mole takes over a company. Past example:
-Rick Belluzo: while at HP, he announced to the press that HP would be "dumping HPUX" in favour of Windows NT (it wasn't true, and it did cause a panic of sorts). Windows NT 3.1, no less. Later, the mole moved on to SGI where he did precisely that: threw IRIX in the trash and attempted to shove Windows NT where it didn't belong. After thoroughly destroying SGI, he then moved to the Borg Cube itself, I'm sure with a big fat reward.
You gonna fix it this year you think? This has been going on for weeks now. You dirty incompetent fucks.
Are they TRYING to lose relevance? This is just bound to drive developers towards android, and what exactly would the benefit be? It's not as if they're in a position to press clients into paying license fees since that would just drive them away.
Is it even possible to close an open source project? If the license allows derivatives under the same license then would not the community create a Fork and start developing from that?
of the Nerd Rage.
Fujitsu. Musashi-Nakahara office, actually.
Entire rows of programmers working late overtime, desperately trying to figure out how to get something working in Symbian. It was the most ridiculous thing I ever saw. Even more, in order to get into the office to talk to someone, you need to sign a release that permits you to view the Symbian source.
I'm sure Symbian is a source of income for Nokia, with unimaginative Japanese companies like Hitachi and Fujitsu stumbling over themselves trying to find new ways to get a return on their 10 year "experience investment". God forbid they actually try to build something that Docomo and AU didn't order them to build - the idea of building a phone for the gigantic foreign market never hit them, apparently.
As an side, my supervisor there was a intelligent lady who was chosen out of 400 applicants. Her response when I told her about the iPhone 2g? "Why would anyone use that? Won't it get finger prints all over it?"
Closing the source of such a poor operating system as Symbian may be a clever move. People might start to think that there is now some value in it. I used to program in it quite some years ago and my impression at the time (not changed since) was that it owed its position to being owned by Nokia, and being at the time was the only smart phone system on the market. Programming in it was not easy and took at least 4 times as long as programming Windows. I remember any kind of memory leak was forbidden, or the software wouldn't work. When I eliminated all the ones in my code I discovered that the OS calls I was making were themselves leaking. At that point I threw in the towel.
I love when sentences can be ambiguously changed later by redefining the meaning of words...
Hutz: All right gentleman. I will take your case. But I will require a thousand dollar retainer.
Bart: A thousand dollars. But your ad says "no money down".
Hutz: Oh, they got this all screwed up. [corrects ad with felt-marker]
Bart: So you don't work on a contingency basis?
Hutz: No, money down. Oops, I shouldn't have the Bar Association logo here either. [Hutz eats ad]
...dead.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
What I get from this is that they've seen and fear Android's success! You see, technical support is one of the largest expenses in maintaining your own platform, and they've cleverly deduced that if you don't have customers, you don't have to pay for technical support! They plan to ride this strategy all the way to the top of the heap!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Last year, I attended a meeting in Mountain View, CA hosted by Nokia to announce their new app store, Ovi, and 'open' platform based on JavaScript, the language everyone loves to hate. It seemed like a sincere attempt to recruit talented programmers to join a trip on the Titanic. There were a lot of sincere people making excuses and promising to do whatever it took to take on Microsoft. "We are the largest mobile phone company in the world, and we will respond accordingly," or something like that. I will say that the food was good.
They did respond like the largest mobile phone manufacturer, sinking their 'open' platform and joining up with the largest proprietary OS manufacturer. It is like a binary star system imploding into a black hole. Ironic, too, since Microsoft will buy RIM in Q4 for $39B, effectively screwing this deal. If this were fiction, then nobody would read it. Reality has such a wonderful way of making an acid trip seem like a lukewarm bath.
So "open" is not for open source but for "open for business".
And I guess "direct" is not for, well, "direct", but rather for "we just act as if we're doing something useful", as in "directing a movie". Or is direct now the opposite of erect, i.e. the opposite of upping something up?
It's all in the definition. Not the delivery.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm still amazed at how the Microsoft trojan managed to work his way into Nokia so effectively. Someone must have let it happen.
Does anyone have any ideas as to what could have happened?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Fuck you, Nokia. You're rapidly falling behind and becoming irrelevant. Your handset hardware is pretty nice, but the software is sorely lacking. You're very last decade at this point.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Does anyone know where I could get a copy of the last version that was actually open? Even if it's out of date, it would really useful as a starting point for writing emulators and he like.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
When nokia deciced to open source Symbian, they did not understand the ways how open source software/development model works.
You cannot take a closed-source code and think that when you open the source, suddently thousands of other people will come to help you and do your work for you.
The amount of people who actually downloaded the symbian os source code and succesfully compiled it themselves outside Nokia and some other big phone manufacturers can propably be calculated with fingers of one hand.
SymbianOS was piece of terribly written code that used very strange coding practices, and getting it to compile was quite hard. By just giving this kind of code to public does not create any kind of "open source momentum". No people are interested in contributing to it when they cannot get any benefit from their changes, and when making those changes is so hard.
So, in the end, nobody loses when the source is closed.
How sure are we that current Nokia leadership doesn't have shares in other phone manufacturers? As fas as I can see there isn't much else left to screw up now..
Insert
I guess this has nothing to do with the Microsoft deal :)
I don't understand....sure, Nokia can close whatever it chooses to call 'Symbian'...but it was open in the real sense so anyone who cared could have copied the code and forked it then. It seems no body (esp. from the US and/or /.) cared to do that, so why is anyone bothered what Nokia decide to do with their copy of the code?
Max.
I suspect that a significant part of Nokia has been working for this, and for a very obvious reason; career insurance. Symbian had limited life, Maemo/Meego offered limited career scope. A commitment to Microsoft meant that Nokia engineers and managers had things on their CVs that offered prospects outside Nokia. The Microsoft deal could be a vote of no confidence in the long term future of the Finnish economy, and given the way that phone components are almost entirely made in the Far East, and applications generally made in the Anglophone world or Western Europe, they might be right.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I'm sure someone downloaded the source code under the EPL. Would it be possible to post the link for an archive, more for historical purposes than for actual development?
And not a single fuck was given.
This is in no way surprising but... the statement was made on the Symbian Nokia blog. Until 31 March the posts there were made by their HEad of Open Source including one on 31 march saying the source code was available and they'll be uploading the rest in coming days.
The "oh we didn't mean that kind of open" post was made by "admin" and has no signature declaring what dept "admin" is in. So it appears that this is not a decision the Open Source team were either aware of or perhaps happy with? I'm just guessing here of course but I think the fact that this latest statement doe snot specifically come from the open source team speaks volumes.
nothing good would come from Nokia and Microsoft teaming up. When Nokia 'open-sourced' Symbian, they expected a large following of open-source developers to code their flagship mobile OS. It didn't happen; so now their running back behind closed doors like a whiny little kid taking back their toy. Hint: Nokia, it takes more than saying your code is open-source, for people to want to actively code it. For starters, how about making it even a fraction as easy or possible to compile as some other OS kernel.
ANYthing that can be closed at the whim of a private person or party, is NOT open. 'open at whim', 'temporarily open' are more appropriate terms for these.
Read radical news here
That's why they called it "OVI" (door in finnish)
It's easy to shut...
That Slashdot pay a large bounty for the head of anybody who starts a Slashdot argument on whether BSD or GPL is freer. Other body parts are optional.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Wasn't it Bill Gates who described open source as "virus like" ? We now know that "virus like" applies to Micro$oft and their (ex-)employees
Hold crap! What are we going to do now? Without open Symbian, whatever will we do! Will Nokia's strangle hold on smart phones never end! Oh, the humanity!
http://thenextweb.com/location/2011/02/08/symbian%E2%80%99s-huge-market-share-looks-to-be-in-play/
I8-D
Symbian was ALLWAYS a bad platform, which got little traction outside Nokia, and some of the technical decisions eg "Symbian Signed" were brain dead marketing ideas that made the platform even more hostile. Ie if Nokia didn't do it you could not have it, even on your own phone, period.
So Symbian spoilt Nokia's high end while the margins on the low end, simple phone eg N3110, 5 days battery life were eroded to nothing. Nothing Nokia has done, at the high end has worked and they have destroyed all confidence that they know how to build a smart-phone. I predict WP7 will be a disaster and will do neither Nokia or M$ any good.
Nokia had the money to make QT+mego a success, but none of the drive, immagination or technical management to realize sucess.
When the M$ adventure is seen to flop they will be done. Very Sad.
QT propably next too. I can't help myself thinking, this must be intentional.
CEO eLobster is either painfully trying to make Nokia commit suicide by biting itself to tongue or driving the stock price down for MSFT merger.
Instead of the Zune, you'll have the 'The Microsoft Nokia (tm)' smartphone.
Lets see.. How likely is it that Nokia name will be reduced to a model of phone?
http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:NOK
oops:
Nokia Debt Rating Lowered One Step by Moodyâ(TM)s
HTC Passes Nokia in Market Cap
Fuck this is depressing. I was really hoping for a Meego box. Oh well.
Deleted
There's an old Finnish saying that can be used when complaining how someone gave something and then changed his mind and took it back.
"Ottaja ja antaja, kissan paskan kantaja"
English translation with similar rhymes could be: "Giver, taker, cat poo baker".
There is a copy on sourceforge but no developers to improve on it.