The Symbian Foundation launches [LWN.net]

The Symbian Foundation has announced its existence. The foundation's plan is to make the Symbian S60 handset platform available royalty-free to its members - for now. "Also, it will commit to moving the platform to open source during the next two years, with the intent to use the Eclipse Public License. This will make the platform code available to all for free, bringing additional innovation to the platform and engaging even a broader community in future developments." This is all a result of Nokia's purchase of Symbian.

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 24, 2008 23:33 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (16 responses)

When Nokia bought Trolltech/Qt I was convinced this was a slight move towards Linux. It sort
of made sense. But this is the opposite, a strategic move towards Symbian.

What doesn't make sense is that they expect additional innovation at a cheaper price (there is
talk of layoffs in Symbian related companies). Who will develop for their platform for free
when Linux, as an established multi vendor platform, is already there with Android and
Openmoko?

Strange. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 25, 2008 0:11 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

Err, Symbian has shipped on hundreds of different models over a number of years, while Android
and Openmoko are still in initial development and have not shipped on even one successful
phone.  Linux definitely has an advantage in overall mindshare, but calling it the more
"established platform" with respect to phones is crazy?

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 25, 2008 8:35 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

Oh, sorry, I wasn't very clear. I meant that first and foremost that Linux has established
trust (nobody doubts Linux is there in the long run) and that it is a multi vendor platform
(which actually works). In comparison, Symbian will be very associated with Nokia and will
have a harder time attracting developer mindshare.

But there is also the fact that many more people can develop for Linux than for Symbian. The
world beyond phones is also relevant, and will be even more as "smart phones" gain market
share. All of these things are important when your competitors are on Linux and believe me,
they will be in a few years time.

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 25, 2008 5:44 UTC (Wed) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link] (12 responses)

> When Nokia bought Trolltech/Qt I was convinced this was a slight move towards Linux. It sort
of made sense. But this is the opposite, a strategic move towards Symbian.

Yes, this move certainly clarifies Nokia's position: pushing Symbian as hard as it can. Making
it royalty-free and even open source is a quite radical move, of the same scale as Sun GPLing
Java.

This isn't good news for Linux. Some of us were hoping Nokia would fully back Linux, after
some initial moves (N800, buying Qt). Still, Linux is represented by Google's Android and
others, so it's too early to tell how well Linux will do on handsets.

This also isn't good news for Qt, as this implies Qt isn't a big part in Nokia's overall plan.
In fact at this point it's hard to say what use Qt is for Nokia, except that by owning Qt
Nokia has control of what could otherwise be a possible problematic technology. In fact, were
Nokia to buy Qt today, I would immediately suspect the acquisition was for precisely such a
purpose (i.e., to bury it, or stagnate it, or at least prevent others from buying it), but
since this happened a while ago, perhaps back then they didn't know yet that they would be
committing to the Symbian route instead.

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 25, 2008 7:41 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (5 responses)

Trying to define 'Nokia's position' in these terms is pretty pointless: the current line of
devices includes four platforms, being the hyper-cut-down-still-written-in-ASM S30 for the
ultrabasic phones, S40 for the basic general-purpose phones, S60 for smartphones and
'multimedia computers', and Linux for the Maemo devices.

So yes, you could argue that 'Nokia's position' is to push Symbian as hard as possible
everywhere they can based on this.  However, you'd have to argue that based on past form,
their position is to push S30 absolutely everywhere, given its dominant marketshare.  Or that
their position is to push Symbian absolutely everywhere, given the amount of marketing
dedicated to the N series in particular.  Or that their position is to push Linux as much as
possible, given that they built the Maemo platform from the ground up (obviously building on
existing open source projects and components, but a first for Nokia).

The reality, as always, is rather more complex. :)

(Nokia employee, not speaking for Nokia.)

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 25, 2008 8:44 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't doubt that, but you still have to have a strategy. It took IBM 15 years to unify their
hardware under POWER, but it was an obvious choice in the long run. I don't think that Nokia
wants to keep their current platform diversity in a tightening market for too long.  They are
obviously exploring options, so one can't really help speculating...

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 25, 2008 9:13 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

Sure, no-one said that a strategy wasn't important.  I don't think, however, that a strategy
means 'all your eggs in one basket'.  The majority of Nokia's marketshare is still tiny phones
which are as cheap as possible to both produce and sell, and run a custom OS consisting
entirely of handwritten ASM, as the hardware isn't capable of running a real OS.  There's a
big need/demand for this, especially in emerging markets, so it's clearly very important.

However, given that, you wouldn't really say that all Nokia products should be running S30: it
clearly doesn't scale to the high end.  Nor do S60 or Linux scale to the extremely low end.

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 25, 2008 21:39 UTC (Wed) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link] (2 responses)

IBM unified it's hardware.  Actually not all of it - mainframes are still separate.  It did
nothing to unify it's software, or operating systems - they still develop and support _seven_
of them, if I count correctly.

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 27, 2008 16:31 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (1 responses)

Last I saw the IBM mainframe machines were POWER devices with a different interface (one that
is a superset of the S/390 instruction set).

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 30, 2008 6:35 UTC (Mon) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]

Probably you mean iSeries (which use POWER CPUs as well as pSeries), not zSeries which I am
sure are still much more different from POWER.

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 25, 2008 7:44 UTC (Wed) by bangert (subscriber, #28342) [Link] (5 responses)

S60 is a convenience API on top of the Symbian OS. It was developed 
because _everybody_ agreed that the original Symbian API sucks.

When Nokia bought Trolltech, they explained that they want to reimplement 
the S60 API on top of Qt/Qtopia.

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 25, 2008 8:46 UTC (Wed) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link] (4 responses)

> When Nokia bought Trolltech, they explained that they want to reimplement the S60 API on top
of Qt/Qtopia.

Hmm, that would be *tremendous* news, which I seem to have missed somehow. Got a link?

Qt over S60

Posted Jun 25, 2008 9:47 UTC (Wed) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (3 responses)

Here's one link that's quite informative:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/6620_Nokia_to_ac... - a Nokia slide
shows Qt over S40, S60 and Linux.  This makes a lot of sense, as Qt is good for cross-platform
development and helps unify their disparate product lines, though not as much as going all
Linux perhaps.  Given Nokia's huge investment in Symbian to date it would be rather surprising
if they dumped it for Linux, but open sourcing the OS layer and using Qt on top of
royalty-free S60 is not bad, as it will give a huge boost to the Qt developer base and
ultimately applications, many of which will be open source given Qt's licensing.  Once a
developer has a Qt application on S60, which should be a very high volume platform as
smartphones become more popular, it shouldn't be too hard to port it over to Qt on Linux.

One interesting point is whether the various mobile Linux based stacks from Android, OpenMoko,
Ubuntu, Nokia and others will support 'foreign' applications - you could probably support Qt
on Android, for example, but it's likely it won't be 'out of the box'.  It seems that OpenMoko
is dropping GTK+ and moving to Qt and Qtopia, on top of X11:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080522-openmoko-li...

Qt over S60

Posted Jun 25, 2008 9:56 UTC (Wed) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link] (2 responses)

> Here's one link that's quite informative:
> http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/6620_Nokia_to_ac... - a Nokia slide
> shows Qt over S40, S60 and Linux.

That's the slide from the announcement, yeah, I'm familiar with it. But it doesn't support the
claim to which I asked for a supporting link.

My point is that, given this latest announcement about Symbian, it seems that Symbian will be
a main focus of Nokia's efforts. And the more Nokia goes behind a single platform - and it
seems it wants Symbian to go head-to-head with Android and the other competitors - the less Qt
makes sense for Nokia.

However, it might still fill some niche in Nokia's plans, it's too early to tell.

Qt over S60

Posted Jun 25, 2008 20:05 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

I found this interview very interesting.

The information could perhaps complement this week's feature article on Symbian, which didn't have as much content as one could have hoped for.

Qt over S60

Posted Jul 2, 2008 21:03 UTC (Wed) by BackSeat (guest, #1886) [Link]

And the more Nokia goes behind a single platform - and it seems it wants Symbian to go head-to-head with Android and the other competitors - the less Qt makes sense for Nokia.

Nokia absolutely do not want to back the wrong horse. It would be much cheaper for Nokia to back both a Symbian and a Linux development team for a couple of years (and then maybe pick one) than it would be for them to place all their eggs in one basket and discover later that it was the wrong basket.

They'd probably prefer Symbian to be more successful than Linux, but Symbian is slow and it may not be a trivial fix to speed it up. Having said that, I've not seen Linux on a phone yet, but I'd imagine it to be faster than Symbian (can anyone comment on that?).

The Symbian Foundation launches

Posted Jun 25, 2008 21:41 UTC (Wed) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link]

I would ask the reverse question - who will develop for Linux, where other platforms are
there, established and now even open?

... "during the next two years"

Posted Jun 26, 2008 2:14 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link]

If it takes two years to open-source the thing, it may not still be relevant.