
Symbian Operating System now open source - omfut
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/symbian-operating-system-now-open-source-and-free/
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kqr2
From the article:

 _About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more,” says
Williams. “And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is
closed or proprietary.”_

Can anyone with more Android experience comment on this? What is the 2/3 that
has been kept proprietary?

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hypermatt
You can download builds of the Android operating system and fully rebuild your
whole phone from source, so that seems odd to me also.

~~~
there
which don't contain the proprietary apps from google like maps, gtalk, app
market, and youtube.

in addition, a number of android phones currently on the market have closed-
source hardware drivers for things like their wireless radios.

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briansmith
Symbian isn't open sourcing any of those things either, AFAICT. Symbian will
still have many closed source components similar to Android. Symbian also has
components that are not open source, but whose Android equivalents are--e.g.
its fonts and the font rendering code. In fact, the Symbian fonts have a very
restrictive license--no redistribution allowed, usage for R&D purposes only.

Further, during the open-sourcing process, Symbian created new ("open source
special") implementations of some components; that is, the open-source
implementations of some components are not the same as the implementations
that real devices have been using. It will be a long time, if ever, before
these open-source versions catch up to the production-quality versions.

The Android license (BSD) is a lot easier/safer to comply with than Symbian's
license (EPL). And, if you actually want to read the source code, Android's
code is a lot easier to jump into than Symbian's is. (I'm not saying Android's
code is better or that Symbian's code is bad; I'm just saying that there are
many layers of indirection and unusual, Symbian-specific idioms in Symbian's
code that makes it difficult to read.)

Anyway, I don't understand why Symbian is so eager to start the "who's more
open source" debate. On many points, Android clearly wins on open-sourciness.
I'm sure Symbian wins on other open-sourciness points. Open-sourcing was a
smart thing for Symbian to do, whether Android exists or not, and I think
Symbian should emphasize the positive aspects of this change.

That said, it would be very cool if somebody created a table that detailed
which parts of Android and Symbian are open source, component-by-component,
side-by-side.

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lanstein
From the 'too little, too late' department...

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jdietrich
Nonsense. It might be 'too little, too late' to take on the iPhone, but it's
timed perfectly for the real market for mobile phones. It's easy to forget
that there are an estimated four billion GSM subscribers worldwide, most of
whom neither know nor care about Android or the iPhone.

The global mobile OS market is currently dominated by Nucleus, OSE and Series
40 - these three platforms have a combined market share of 90%.

For Series 40 users, the obvious upgrade path is Series 60 - of course Nokia
will lose many of these customers, but they will keep many more.

That leaves us with the myriad manufacturers using Nucleus and OSE. These
manufacturers, many of them completely unknown in the west, are producing
featurephones for customers who are highly price sensitive and are
staggeringly fickle and fashion-led.

When looking for an upgrade path to a full smartphone OS, the main concern of
these manufacturers will be cost - of implementation and of Bill of Materials.
Symbian has clear advantages over other smartphone platforms in this respect,
being royalty-free and having significantly lower hardware requirements than
Android. An open code base will open the door to these Chinese manufacturers
and their dizzying diversity of hardware and software designs.

I reckon that the Symbian Foundation has played an absolute blinder here - it
may have lost North America, but it still has a dominant position in EMEA and
has set itself up perfectly to launch an aggressive assault on BRIC.

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fauigerzigerk
What you say sounds reasonable on the face of it, but there's one piece
missing. Do these manufacturers believe that Symbian can keep up with the pace
of new hardware designs and software fashions or that it even survives?

Now, I'm anything but an expert on Symbian, but my general impression was that
Symbian has been falling behind and Nokia has been suffering financially
partly because of that.

If I was a Chinese handset manufacturer I would ask myself who I can trust
more to stick to its platform and subsidise further development, Google or
Nokia (or even Microsoft if they manage to pull off a comeback).

Nokia has started to make high-end Linux based phones as well. Why would they
do that if they believe in Symbian? And why would Nokia, a handset
manufacturer itself, subsidise an OS that other handset manufacturers are
successfully using?

There are too many unanswered questions around Symbian I think.

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pavlov
_Nokia has started to make high-end Linux based phones as well. Why would they
do that if they believe in Symbian?_

The explanation is right there in your first sentence -- "high-end". Symbian
can work with 1/10th of the CPU and 1/20th of the RAM compared to Nokia's
Maemo Linux platform.

It will be a long time before all phones can be equipped with ARM Cortex CPUs
and 256 MB RAM. In the meantime, there will be literally billions of phones
sold with much lesser specs. It makes a lot of sense for Symbian to target
that market.

(It's curious that Nokia gets so much flack for using multiple operating
systems, when other vendors don't have a single OS that would span their whole
range either... The existence of Mac OS X doesn't imply that iPhone OS is too
limited. Windows Mobile isn't suffering because Windows 7 is so much better.
Google has both Android and Chrome OS, etc. Different devices, different
users, different operating systems.)

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pavlov
The article says that Symbian powers most of Nokia's phones, but that's not
correct. AFAIK, Symbian is on about 20% of Nokia's offerings, with the rest
running their closed dumbphone operating systems (Series 30/40).

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whyleyc
More in-depth analysis on BBC tech site here:

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8496263.stm>

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joe_the_user
I hope this is good sign.

I'm developing a simple-but-powerful desktop QT app that I hope to port to
symbian and Android at a later point.

As an application framework, QT (developed by Nokia) rocks and it would be
nice to have it target lots of open platforms.

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munctional
I don't know if it's fair to say that Qt was developed by Nokia. Nokia
acquired Trolltech last year (who were the developers of it).

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joe_the_user
Uh, I meant; _Nokia currently develops Qt_ ; Qt as it currently stands _is
developed by_ Nokia. Qt _was_ developed by developed by Trolltech. Nokia
didn't originally develop Qt. I didn't say _"was developed by"_... Buffalo
buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo ... English ... has a lot
tense strangeness...

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rbanffy
If an operating system falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does
it make a sound?

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c00p3r
No hype, no hacker's fame, just a boring and outdated stuff.

~~~
c00p3r
to dear down-voters: what is the reason to develop on really crappy platform
for outdated devices with 128x128 screens which people throw away and buy new
once a year?

