No, not the economy. Instead, here are some recent signs that “the Open Source thing” is really getting started for the Symbian Platform.

Note: We are still in beta, so you will need to register to follow some of the links…

People are downloading and compiling the code

People are now raising issues in Bugzilla to report problems which they find when trying to use the code. Some of the reports come from  employees of member companies, but not all of them.

• Ziteng Chen has reported several memory leak problems in the Webuis package, with suggested fixes. Great work, Ziteng, you are the first “member of the public” to help us in this way, and we thank you for it.
• Johan Oreland from Sosco has raised bugs with suggested fixes about conflicting exports of the same source files

It’s good to see the reports and suggested fixes, but is that all…?

Package Owners are accepting contributions

We’ve seen the first contribution offered, accepted by the package owner and delivered back into Mercurial. A round of applause please for Alten Ltd with this contribution to the Comms Framework package, and to Remek Zajac for being the first package owner to run the contribution process for real.

And I’m getting to grips with my job

Well, making progress anyway. I’m happy to say that we have now the first PDK candidate which we’ve managed to build ourselves from the source code in Mercurial – I mentioned this at the end of my blog posting back in May, and it’s taken longer than I’d hoped (but not as long as I feared). Expect it to hit the web site this week.

Doesn’t sound like much? Maybe, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with getting up from the sofa, and these are positive signs that the journey is underway.