Symbian Foundation web sites to shut down, closing open source project | Hacker News Reader

Symbian Foundation web sites to shut down, closing open source project

developer.symbian.org

28 pointsbensummers7 comments

For an insight into what happens to Symbian now, here are the short notes from the Symbian Foundation's last meeting:

http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/2010-11-24_All_councils_wr...

After Dec 17, the Symbian Foundation retains only a skeleton crew tasked with shutting down operations.

Nokia's representative made the following points about their plans for Symbian going forward:

- The Symbian platform remains business critical to Nokia and their estimate of selling >50m S^3-based devices still holds

- Nokia plan to develop the Symbian platform further

- Nokia are looking at an alternate open and direct model for making the platform available to the community in future. The aim is that the model "will be no less open, free and flexible" than today's

Why are they doing distro via DVD's? That's kind of insane, why not just put a symbian account on github, upload each project, and let what ever community there is take over from there.

Nokia is a Big Company, and while there are people there who really get open source, as an organization I've never got that impression about them.

Well they didn't do that much software before. But just look at QT -- they're managing open source project and they're doing it very well. Also they opened it more. Now think what would happen if Oracle were to buy Trolltech.

As far as I know, Qt is entirely being managed by the people who used to run it before -- Nokia just bought them, gave them some new priorities (main target is now smartphones), told them they don't have to make a profit anymore and set them loose.

The major changes that happened at Qt (namely the LGPL release and dropping copyright assignment) are a direct result of getting paid by Nokia to make software instead of selling it.

For starters they use mercurial, those repos are still up for now, not every project they host is open source, and the open source projects are not all freely licensed for the older versions.

For the stuff that a theoretical community can legally pick up, they're free to do so independently, but I have no idea why the hell anyone would work on this crap for free.

I worked on some of those sites. Good riddance.

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