Comments on: Symbian: A Lesson on the Wrong Way to Use Open Source

By: Hardeep Singh

Hardeep Singh — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 03:21:32 +0000

Stupid article with the restricted American view.

By: Alessandro Pedarra

Alessandro Pedarra — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:08:56 +0000

I think, like others, that Symbian (3) is actually good and will be better in the future.

Nokia has done a lot of great things recently and their future is looking really bright after some unlucky smartphones (like the N97).

Today Nokia is pushing really hard with the new (and open source!) platform (Symbian ^3), the new phones (especially the new C series), and the QT framework.

I will happily buy one of their new smartphones this holiday season.

By: kushi purac

kushi purac — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 22:23:43 +0000

“After all, if a product can’t make the grade as a proprietary product, it will almost certainly fare worse as an open-source product.”

Netscape–> Mozilla Firefox

By: Fred

Fred — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 10:13:43 +0000

Developers in large companies often have an established way of working. What’s clear with Nokia is that that way is not or was not uniformly good. The complaints about consistency in the UI etc are reminiscent of people working in silos.

If people can’t work together internally (my conjecture) then they aren’t really going to do it externally either. In other words there is more to open source than dumping the code.

The dropping of S^4 etc sounds like a brilliant move to me. I bet that it removes a *great* deal of complexity. The idea of producing continuous improvements rather than epic releases is also much more like the way Open Source works. It’s all much less rigid.

With some hardware for developers to play on (e.g. a beagleboard and the new S^3 phones) and some better collaboration from a re-organised Nokia, I think that open source Symbian has a long term future. It’s actually essential that Nokia’s Symbian outfit learns to work in a way that’s compatible with OSS.

With Meego, for example, there is no other option.

By: mafalda

mafalda — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:21:36 +0000

soon the chart will say Qt instead of symbian. a post on that would have been far more insightful and informative. no brownie points for being bearish on symbian.

By: Jo

Jo — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:50:24 +0000

“…Start by creating yourself a developer.symbian.com account…”

That’d be developer.symbian.org

By: Tim F.

Tim F. — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:56:48 +0000

Open always wins.

Bwahahahaha… Damn, almost made it before clicking “submit.”

By: APS

APS — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 08:22:06 +0000

Just a thought but maybe Nokia is quite happy with the situation it finds Symbian in now. Since going open source all of the partners of Symbian who actually owned stakes in it have given them up to form the open source Symbian Foundation. Now that it seems SE and Samsung are not interested in further development and Motorola went away ages ago Nokia is now free to focus the code on improvements it needs which should if anything help it rapidly improve.

Another point is that before open sourcing Symbian all licensees had to pay a license cost per device sold. As nokia sells by far the most Symbian devices it’s definitely saving it self a ton of money not paying a license anymore; savings it can invest in things like QT.

By: GeceBekcisi

GeceBekcisi — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 03:23:57 +0000

Matt, next time do yourself a favor and don’t humiliate yourself by writing about things that appearently you don’t really get; just look above and count how many times you’ve been pwned.

By: bumpy

bumpy — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 01:24:27 +0000

Two counterexamples to your thesis: Netscape, re-emerging as Firefox; and Blender, re-emerging as Blender. Each required a massive re-write. Each is now a well-known and robust success.

So there is a right way to go about it. It does require actually releasing the code.