Now let me see - this is not as much about the so called “partners” but about getting people to develop on their platform. Rodolfo is right on the money about them “long term not getting it.”

On Markus,

I think we need not hold our breath for next year - they need to get aggressive right now.

I found the URL. John Forsyth leads the strategy group at Symbian and has a great blog at (link) . I hope he forgives me the longer quotes from his blog posts. They seem to answer your question “Why Is Symbian Charging Its Partners?”, as he says:

(link)

…

To that end, there will be a new not-for-profit entity to host and guide the platform: The Symbian Foundation. Anyone who agrees with the basic principles and by-laws of the Foundation will be able to join (you can register your details for more information on membership here), and the source code to all the components that the founding members have contributed will be available to Foundation Members from Day 1 (which will be a short while after the deal is closed). In due course, the platform source code will be made available to anyone who wants it under the Eclipse Public License. And the platform will be royalty-free.

…

Why not open source on Day 1?

Being able to do so would be great, but we want to make sure of two things. One, that all the contributors have time to go through the necessary steps before contributing their code to the Foundation, because they will in effect be granting patent licenses to their competitors in doing so, and on the whole if you’re granting patent licenses to your competitors it’s best to check with your legal department.

And two, that what we open up makes sense and is really usable - i.e. that it is consistently commented, well-documented and so on. And of course that we have the rights to open source it: today some of the code in Symbian OS and the other platform components is licensed in from third parties whose rights we will obviously take care to respect. These processes are going to take a little while, but we will try to work out a way of doing it in phases so that really useful bits of source get prioritised and released earlier.

(link)

…

To start with, it doesn’t mean people have to wait two years before they can access source code. In fact you can think of the plan as being in three stages. Stage One: between now and the regulatory approval of the transaction, during which time nothing changes. Stage Two: once the Foundation starts operations, let’s say some time early next year, at which point the source code will be available to all Foundation Members. Stage Three: the code gets released under the EPL to all (including non-Members). The transition from Two to Three should more likely be a progressive process, incidentally, rather than a single big-bang.

…

Whether ‘free’ really means free
Basically, yes it does. If there is a catch here it seems a minor one: that period where the code will only be available to Members, who need to pay US$1500 annual Membership dues. And free means we don’t even have any plans to fund the Foundation by putting adverts in the source code.

Next year or so everything will be free and open source. That’s what I read in the new blog of one of the Symbian foundation’s head honchos. Only that I cannot remember his name and the URL.

My guess–not based on any insider knowledge I might have–is that they have to charge SOMETHING for access to the source, given the various cross-licensing agreements that are in place.

Of course, if all goes as planned, this entire exercise will be moot in a couple of years anyway. The entire stack will go open source, making it possible for ANYONE–even people who didn’t pony up to the $1500 a year to be in the foundation–to have access to the source.

Symbian was born to block Microsoft’s entrance in the cellular networks and since the same big boys (now Nokia) make money by selling the network infrastructure their customers are the telcos. not you. not the developers.

thats why originally they were asking 20k USD for the dubious honor of joining their crappy developmers program. and that is why their market share in the enterprise space in North America is zero.

to be fair Symbian deverves only a limited amount of bashing. problems where also with S60 (which has always been nokia’s). and have you ever tried to use a windows mobile phone? omfg.

Symbian still thinks that charging 1500 dollars will attract the best developers while weeding out the penniless hackers. I will end up paying that but I am not amused nor impressed.

They still don’t get it. And they are going to fail.