The importance of the spread of free and open source software (FOSS) continues to impact a number of areas outside traditional software development.
Today sees the introduction of The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review.
Quote:
“New ideas need time to gain general acceptance and, to begin with, few of those in the wider business community were aware of the profound changes which were taking place, and many of those who were aware of the changes misunderstood them. By and large, business people sought legal certainty and what they perceived as reliability, so clung on to nurse for fear of something worse. They regarded words like ‘copyleft’ with suspicion; and they looked at the preamble to GPL 2 and saw a document which looked to them more aspirational than legal in nature: a Constitution for the State of Hackerdom rather than a serious business tool.
However, some more far-sighted businesses saw Free and Open Source software much more accurately as a valuable business tool, upon the back of which entire business models might realistically be built. They were the pioneers, but it would not be long before the rest of the world began to catch up. Governments and institutions around the world began to see considerable gains in respect of strategic independence, lowered costs and increased reliability through the use of Free and Open Source software. In the commercial world, the old proprietary software business models daily seemed less and less relevant to the modern market place, and Free and Open Source software broke through as a serious player. There was a definite sense that the tide had turned.”
14 Comments
Symbian ruins every phone it touches, I am surprised it hasn’t been abandoned yet. I have recently bought a Samsung i8910, a brilliant piece of hardware but the OS is incoherent and poorly designed. I haven’t been able to download a decent application for it yet, mainly because they are scattered across the internet and secondly they don’t work with the phone model/OS version. The phone could have been so much more if it had Android on it but instead I have to make do with Java based crapware available for Symbian.
> Symbian ruins every phone it touches, I am surprised it hasn’t been
> abandoned yet.
Well, given that Symbian has over 50% of the worldwide smartphone market that doesn’t seem to be a common opinion.
> I haven’t been able to download a decent application for it yet, mainly
> because they are scattered across the internet
This is being fixed by the introduction of the Ovi App Store.
> The phone could have been so much more if it had Android on it
Android is a very nice product and the competition between Google and Symbian will really drive innovation and quality in both companies. However, Google have <2% of the market at the moment so you're going to have to wait quite a while to have a choice of devices to run Android on.
Apologies for for the location of the rant but was a little frustrated and happened to stumble here. As I said I have just bought my i8910 and it already feels like a software brick. The main reason I got it is for its camera and video recording capabilities.
Symbian has been around for a long time, the only Symbian phone that I really liked was the Sony Ericsson P800 but that may have been because it was the first touch screen device/smartphone that I came across. It has been down hill ever since. Symbian phones a typically very well spec’d and are ok to use in terms of ui and general useability as long as you don’t want anything else.
Symbian is highly fragmented, it has taken for the appearance of Apple’s iphone and Google’s Android for there to be any movement in the Symbian community. It has been stagnating for a long time.
I have had the Sony Ericsson P1i for almost a year and the number of third party apps I have on it are 2. I must have installed and uninstalled about a hundred. A large portion of those have simply not worked properly or have been very poor quality programs.
The Ovi Store is only for Nokia phones, they may use the same OS version as my i8910 but there is no guarantee that it will work on it and Nokia aren’t going to be bothered if it does or doesn’t. I downloaded 6 applications yesterday that were created for the Nokia 5800, which uses the same OS I believe, but not a single one worked properly on the i8910.
It’s a shame theres not more choice out there.
daviddurant sounds like a Symbian guy in disguise.
>>>>Well, given that Symbian has over 50% of the worldwide smartphone market that doesn’t seem to be a common opinion.
Well, that sounds like Microsoft telling everyone that 95 percent people opted for Windows. In reality, nobody opted. It’s forced. Same is the case with Symbian.
Another example is Yahoo’s 20 percent search share in US. That’s because it’s bundled and in reality Yahoo search is worse than Bing. There are always going to be technicaly-illiterate customers and companies like these thrive on them.
For Symbian, having 50 % share is one story and sustaining that is another story.
Can Symbian compete in open market and create anywhere near that share from the scratch?
> daviddurant sounds like a Symbian guy in disguise.
I work for Nokia and am more than happy to say so.
As David Wood has very clearly stated elsewhere, fragmentation is easy, integration is hard.
You can in fact run the same application across most of Nokia’s Symbian device portfolio. The fact that you can’t do so with a new Samsung device says something about compatibility testing across manufacturers, rather than anything about the platform itself. This is one of the problems that the Symbian Foundation is setting out to solve, with mandatory compatibility testing on devices based on future platform versions (well you don’t have to test, but if you don’t you can’t claim to be shipping a Symbian device as I understand it).
People keep making comparison to new platforms that haven’t even tried to confront the fragmentation problem yet. Android’s first version’s weren’t compatible with one another and despite providing firmware upgrades to everyone, the iPhone is already starting to fragment, with new features available in the 3G S that can’t be used on the older devices.
I don’t think many people would argue that Symbian’s current UI for touch-screen devices isn’t behind the competition (although you can find some people arguing exactly that on the web, I think they’re generally die-hard Symbian/S60 fans). In many other areas, the platform is ahead.
Surely no-one is “forced” to buy a Symbian device, and certainly not in the way that you’re forced to get Windows on a new PC, there’s plenty of choice in an open market already. In what way is the market not open? Phone hardware isn’t comoditised like PCs yet, so if you want different software you buy different hardware.
Does anyone know the reasons why the i8910 is incompatible with a lot of S60 applications? Sounds like poor form on SE’s part. Symbian is a very good piece of software, but it often gets battered up by the OEM’s and you get left with something that’s treated with disdain. I hope this situation can be fixed, fast…
sorry, that should be Samsung, not SE
The reason is that Samsung and Nokia don’t really care about compatibility with each other. They’re competitors. It’s like giving eggs to two chefs and complaining when one makes an omlette and the other boils the egg. It’s the same ingredient but it’ll taste different.
Compare this with the expectations of Apple. I’d take Mark up on the comment that the iPhone is starting to fragment, it’s correct in a sense but it is the kind of compatibility that users can understand and manages expectation better than the Symbian ecosystem i.e. there is a deliberate decision on Apples behalf to not support new feature X on older h/w, and usually this is related to some hardware feature in the later product.
The problem Symbian has is that Apple is selling a software platform called the iPhone which will go in some handset, while Nokia and Samsung ship handsets which incidentally have the Symbian OS.
The emphasis is important.
I would go as far as to say that Symbian OS isn’t even a platform – it’s just a technology which can be used to make a platform, just like Linux.
You don’t blame Linus if Linux 2.6.30 is used in Debian and RHEL5 and your GUI app doesn’t work on both distributions (crude example of course because Linux is only a kernel… and the integrators are less likely to dick with kernel in a manner to break compatibility)
If you accept this opinion of the difference between Apple and Nokia/Samsung s60 licensees I think it’s a bit unfair to have many serious expectations of application compatibility between manufacturers using Symbian. SF should be pretty honest about this as well.
If someone says: we’ll run a set of tests to ensure platform compatibility, that will always be a limited guarantee. There are always enough forces in a complex enough system to guarantee that at some point there will be some level of incompatibility.
It also is unfortunate that the manufacturers using Symbian have been fairly clueless about maintaining compatibility between even their own handsets though at least that is better than it was in Nokia/s60 land.
@tl – You are right about the iPhone fragmentation of course, it is of an expected and understandable variety, but it is there and there will be more.
You are also right that Symbian OS isn’t a platform, but the Symbian platform (i.e. what used to be Symbian OS, plus a unified application framework, or Qt + Orbit as it will be in the future) is supposed to be a platform. OEMs are supposed to differentiate around the edges of the core platform and should essentially be shipping the same binaries for platform compatibility. If this doesn’t happen then there is very little point in the Symbian Foundation existing IMO. Of course there will always be some minor incompatibilities because of differences in the adaptation to different hardware, but these should be minimized. There will also be incompatibilities where OEMs introduce new features to differentiate, although these are of the expected and understandable variety, comparable to the iPhone situation.
@tl – That’s precisely what I’m talking about. They don’t care about compatibility with each others devices, and I’m not saying that they should, but the end result is people (such as our i8910 friend) saying that Symbian sucks because S60 apps from Ovi or elsewhere don’t work with his (supposedly) Symbian device.
can someone please tell me
why my phone i8910 displays a nokia menu when all the other phones 18910 i see displayed on the internet seems to show tocco menu system instead!!!
this i would prefer to have!!
do i need to download a different version or is there a setting on the phone i have overlooked?
please help!!!!
Hi Andrew,
You may be able to find an answer to your question about the i8910 and the “tocco” / “TouchWiz” menu system in the discussion boards here. There seems to be a lively discussion going on.
// David W.