Symbian Introduces Open Source Release Plan

volume4 brings news that David Wood of the Symbian Foundation has made a post detailing their plans for a release schedule, with new versions due out every six months. We discussed Nokia's acquisition of Symbian for the purpose of open sourcing the popular mobile OS last year. Quoting: "There's a lot of activity underway, throughout the software development teams for all the different packages that make up the Symbian Platform. These packages are finding their way into platform releases. The plan is that there will be two platform releases each year. ... Symbian^2, which is based on S60 5.1, reaches a functionally complete state at the middle of this year, and should be hardened by the end of the year. This means that the first devices based on Symbian^2 could be reaching the market any time around the end of this year — depending on the integration plans, the level of customisation, and the design choices made by manufacturers. Symbian^3 follows on six months later — reaching a functionally complete state at the end of this year, and should be hardened by the middle of 2010."

Big news for Symbian developers!

[BadAnalogyGuy]

int CoolNews(HBufC aNews)
  {
// TODO: Source code won't help you
// learn how to use these freaking
// Symbian buffer types...
  return static_cast<TBoolC>(1);
  }

Android

[rufus t firefly]

Sounds like a response to Android, but a little late.

Other than install base for phones, what advantage does an opensourced Symbian have over Android?

There were rumors of Android and Symbian merging for a while, but it seems as though Symbian has taken to cheap heckling [zdnet.co.uk].

Re:Android

[dwater]

...and a massive installed base, massive distribution channels, and clearly a huge number of phones planned to run it from several different manufacturers.

Actually, it might be more appropriate to ask what Android has over Symbian...the only thing I can think of is the development environment, but that's not so clear cut, in my mind at least.

Hopeless

[omb]

You dont even understand what you are telling the world, Symbian should be using GCC targeted for arm, thumb. That way other far more competant people would be worrying about the compiler, and you could cross compile a decent CVS like git or subversion, on the platform.

Qt would compile

gdb would work

You dont begin to get it. All these 'decisions' were driven by the wish to develop a proprietary lock-in product that actually failed in the business sense. Symbian and most other vendors in the embedded space do not have the resources to compete with the FOSS world, neither do Apple. Nokia, and M$ have the money but not the High Level Architects to compete in a pro-active and agile way, they are forever in catch up.

The common sense analogy is the free market -v- directed economies; the former always win, see the old Soviet Union, not because of idiology but because, in directed economies everyone lies and those at the top do not have the information to compete in an agile way.

In the free market people try different things and those that work get funded.

And before politicised people jump in and talk, for example, about GM in the USA, they would have failed long ago without repeated government assistance, all in violation of WTO rules.

This is one of the reasons the rest of the world will not tolerate the rebuilding of the American economic hegmony and many Professors in MBA programs will have to find gainful employment.