(Eclipse + Symbian) * Foundation = The Eclipse Foundation and the Symbian Foundation join forces as the Eclipse Foundation becomes a member of the Symbian Foundation… and the Symbian Foundation a member of the Eclipse Foundation…
The two communities were already linked by their choice of the Eclipse Foundation eponymous Eclipse Public License (EPL), but this is a step further in the collaboration between two non for profit organizations who share more than a license … We share a common vision of providing a business friendly open source environment and a truly open development process for companies and developers . This common vision is really articulated along the following shared principles:
- preserving business opportunities for their members through a weak copy left license, EPL
- delivering high quality platform releases on time through defined development ,road mapping and architectural design processes
- maintaining an unfragmented platform in devices through development practices and license obligations
- providing and promoting a truly open development culture through best practices, mentoring, and a strong community
By joining forces we see clear opportunities to continue to support one another in activities such as the promotion of EPL as a business friendly license. But also learn from one another as Foundations and as communities… The Symbian community could for example benefit from the Eclipse community experience around best practices in open development or how to best profit from open source from a business and technology perspective.
We (as in Eclipse and many companies in the mobile ecosystem) have been collaborating for the last x years (depending on who you talk to), mainly around development tool initiatives aimed at simplifying and standardizing the mobile development experience. As a consequence over time a considerable tools asset base has been created for development on Symbian that strongly depends on Eclipse projects, with Carbide.c++, the WRT Aptana plugin being good examples. In order for the Symbian Foundation to continue to support the development of these assets it only seemed natural to become an active member of the Eclipse community and likely join the recently started Mobile Industry Workgroup and the launch of the Pulsar initiative .
Looking ahead and beyond mobile development tools, exciting opportunities lay ahead for us… facilitating web / widget development for small size devices by non mobile experts… looking at application portability across server/PC, fixed and mobile (a trend started with the eRCP project that aimed at running Eclipse components on a Nokia E90 for example) …
So join me in a warm welcome to the Eclipse Foundation as a a new member of the Symbian movement.
10 Comments
I’m not sure where to ask, and I doubt it’s relevant here, but are the Symbian Foundation still planning to release (parts of) the UIQ codebase, out of interest?
This is great news.
My next question has to be – when are the Foundation going to work with the Eclipse open source community to provide access to the Foundation systems (Bugzilla and Mercurial) via Mylyn?
Not sure if anyone’s noticed, but the URL at the end of this post gives a HTTP 404 error.
If I understand correctly at the moment Carbide is Nokia’s not Symbian Foundation’s and it is not clear from the article if Carbide will be now part of Symbian Foundation with EPL or will there be a new version of Eclipse that supports Symbian projects…
Could you clarify? Sorry if I missed that info in some other post.
On David’s point: I met a few people from the MyLyn project at EclipseCon and there will certainly be a dialog between the foundation and MyLyn project. However I don’t want to preclude the outcome: normally Tasktop, the main contributor of the MyLyn project aims to make connectors and bridges to open source infrastructure available for free. As OpenSolaris will also be using Mercurial, I am quite hopeful that this will happen sooner rather than later.
On Tymek’s question: I will create another blog entry which will look at mobile directed projects and initiatives, which were discussed at Eclipse. Some of it is really good news for developers, such as the Mobile Developer Working group.
On the Carbide question: as long as Carbide code is made available by Nokia under the EPL, it does not matter where it is made available.
It’s like the kecule:
http://www.searchmagazine.org/bin/t/o/ongodhedges.jpg
Symbian Foundation is moving very very slow! To fight iPhone and Android expansion they need to change speed! I am avid Nokia user for many many years, and currently use E71, but every time I take iPhone from my friends to play around with it, and get amazed by huge and clear screen and by ability to touch and scroll long articles and the screen. After iPhone when I use my E71, and feel like I am back 10 years, or something
Nokia still doesn’t have App Store, and most applications they launch, they forget about them, like Podcasting application, which I use everyday… It has many bugs and problems, and Nokia doesn’t really care to fix them and doesn’t want to spend very little money to improve it. So, if this is how Nokia will continue its existence, then it’s easy to predict, that in 5 years, no one will use them. I am personally switching from Nokia this year, to something that has huge touch screen, and I want that this phone will have easy way to develop application for. Basically iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile. Will wait for iPhone 3 this summer and decide, but currently stuck with E71 
Hi ddon,
Can I suggest the N97, the Omnia HD, or the Sony Ericsson Idou? For easy application development I recommed Web Run Time… thoughts?
Hi Tyson,
Ian and I had slight synchronisation issue… It’s all fixed now.. Sorry for that!
On the Carbide issue, it’s still work in progress… As Lars says the good news is that it’s going available!
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[...] license (Symbian OS will be offered under Eclipse Public License, FYI). There’s an “official blog post” at Symbian’s blog talking more on the [...]
[...] license (Symbian OS will be offered under Eclipse Public License, FYI). There’s an “official blog post” at Symbian’s blog talking more on the [...]