Foundations and principles

Symbian Foundation

As you may have noticed, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP to create a new open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone we plan to establish the Symbian Foundation as a means to support everybody who wants to use, and/or enhance this platform. Contributions from Foundation members will be integrated to further enhance the platform. Membership of this non-profit Foundation will be open to all organizations.

To enable the Foundation, Nokia today announced plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation! Sony Ericsson and Motorola also announced their intention to contribute technology from UIQ, and DOCOMO has also indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

Now let’s think a bit what this means. The S60 on top of Symbian is by far the most widely used smartphone platform. If you then add technologies that Moto and SonyE run on top of the Symbian OS you get a pretty good market coverage. 200 million phones shipped already! This all will now be available with very favorable terms – mostly under EPL. And what is most important is that this particular software really works. It is not a specification exercise or a strategy statement. It is real. It runs already in 235 different phone models. And it will be available to all.

Linux @ Nokia will go strong

This is now Nokia’s next step in the smartphone front running Symbian. But this is by no means a sign of us abandoning the work with Linux, Qt, Gstreamer, Mozilla, WebKit, Debian, X org, and so fort. Now, more than ever, we will strengthen our efforts within the upstream projects we already participate in – as well as around the maemo.org. And we will keep on developing most interesting Linux based products also in the future.

Some further comments

Which leads me to comment some of the recent discussion that – let me say – went pretty much where I didn't expect. So as said, we are 100% committed to expand our work with several open source projects, contribute even more code, collaborate, and learn. By doing this we expect to be able to create better Linux and open source base products.

We are by no means in a position to “educate the Linux community” or any other project for that matter. I never used those words, of course. Also, I do not like DRMs, Simlocks or any of that stuff any more than you do. I always want my music DRM free if humanly possible. I buy a laptop and remove Windows to put in Ubuntu and so forth. I also claim that we have been pretty careful in maintaining a proper division between open and close on our software to make it possible for open source portion to grow and get more significant. We have replaced many significant closed components with open ones over the years.

To illustrate my point, let me try to list some of the key principles I hold dear when developing Linux based products around the maemo.org.

-Play by the rules. Respect the projects you participate in. Respect the license fully.
-Be open. Communicate even the difficult topics. Release your roadmap us much as you can and you know. (ours @ maemo.org)
-Contribute code. If not, shut up.
-When closed code is used, make the borderline clear. Respect the licenses used.
-Maximize the use of open source; select a copyleft license if you can.
-Respect the different motivations and agendas. Tell yours and be open about it. (We build products to make money)
-Don’t get intimidated if somebody disagrees with you. Just do what you see right. ( ;-) )
-Ship good products. (sure trying hard!)

These are some of the things we try to do the best we can around Maemo and even more importantly … in the various upstream projects we participate in.