Royalties for free software?

Royalties for free software?

Posted Jun 25, 2008 20:53 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599)
In reply to: Royalties for free software? by osma
Parent article: Symbian to be another open mobile platform

If all of the software is going to be published under an open license (Eclipse), what does the $1500 membership payment pay for?

I wondered the same thing, including whether it was a two-year-only restriction. But another possibility is that they plan to keep a fairly tight hold on the official version (i.e., more cathedral than bazaar), in which case the $1500 might buy you early/behind-the-scenes access to upcoming snapshots. I haven't followed Nokia's existing open-source efforts very closely, so I don't know if that's likely or not. But in my experience, embedded software development tends to be somewhat more controlled/constrained than software development in other areas is.

Greg

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My, purely speculative, thought is that it would give you the right to 
use "Symbian", rather than your own operating system built from Symbian 
sources.

That is, you pay for the brand name and associated compability guarantee. 
Similar to how (most) Java source code now is open source, but you still 
need a license to offer a "Java" solution.