Symbian Foundation Sites To Close 78
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.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
So how is Symbian free software? (Score:1, Interesting)
They say they won't be hosting the source code online and that some of the user-submitted content databases will be available on request.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this means that Symbian ceases to be free software.
Okay then, I won't buy the N8 and look for an Android phone instead.
Re:So how is Symbian free software? (Score:1, Interesting)
Strictly speaking, and assuming that they will host all the source code (and not just some "user submitted" works), this would still make Symbian free software, indeed.
The problem is that like you said, such was the business model of the Free Software Foundation in the early days, like 20 years ago. Today, if they don't provide access to a repo and are not even able to put a tarball on an FTP server, I fear this simply means that they will use a proprietary development model. They might very well drop the license at some point and say "We replaced all the third party code with our stuff, kthxbye" instead of "send a patch (...on a USB stick?)".
IMHO the announcement doesn't bode well and a clarification would be more than welcome. One has to wonder if Nokia really knows where it's going.
Simple solution (Score:1, Interesting)
All they need to do is to make a few torrents and then let the community re-host the content.
There are several sites which offer the Yahoo Geocities archives - so there are undoubtedly more than enough people willing to share hosting resources.
Re:So how is Symbian free software? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sad, but we could see it coming (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Sticking with the other guy on this. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.