IT @ Symbian

I’m Ian McDonald and I’m Head of IT @ the Symbian Foundation. I come from a strong open source background and have used open source software since the 1980s.
me3
I’ve deployed open source software at a number of large corporates including building work management software using largely open source tools at NZ’s largest telco in the 1990s.

I have also served on the committee and was then president of WLUG which was one of New Zealand’s strongest open source societies (despite the name it was far more than Linux).

I started using open source software doing my undergraduate degree at the University of Waikato. I used to download software from around the world and soon got told off for using too much of New Zealand’s bandwidth (It was 2.4Kbits/sec for the whole country!!).

Personally I’ve also got code into projects such as ttcp, iperf and my largest contribution is into the Linux kernel for a new networking protocol DCCP. Hopefully I’ll also start working on the Symbian platform as well in the not too distant future!

At the Symbian Foundation we use a lot of open source software internally and I’m looking to increase this further. In a number of posts coming up I’ll outline how we use open source and what are the challenges for running IT on open source.

This entry was written by Haydn, posted on September 17, 2009 at 10:42 AM, filed under People and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

5 Comments

  1. David Durant
    Posted September 17, 2009 at 10:57 AM | Permalink

    Hi Ian. Thanks for the introduction. It would be great to see a breakdown, between yourself and Paul B., of the environment currently needed to build the OS into what will run on Linux and what is still Windows specific (and what runs in WINE).

    What’s the breakdown of people using Linux / Window within the Foundation and are there any plans to change?

  2. Kensai
    Posted September 17, 2009 at 11:06 AM | Permalink

    Hello Ian. It’s great you people present yourselves lately so we can know who to thank (or blame, it’s part of the game!) for the various Symbian modules that assemble the whole OS. :)

    At the Symbian Foundation we use a lot of open source software internally and I’m looking to increase this further.

    It would be great if you could list/present some of this software. In time, of course, no hurries.

  3. Ian McDonald
    Posted September 17, 2009 at 12:57 PM | Permalink

    Hi David/Kensai

    Thanks for your comments and kind words. I am just responsible for the IT infrastructure that people use, not for the Symbian OS and how that is built. That is something I definitely want to learn more about though.

    As far as OS usage goes we have a mixture of Linux, Windows and OS X on the desktop go. I would like to see more people using Linux and that is something I am working on. I certainly will talk more about our IT infrastructure in later posts.

    Ian

  4. William Roberts
    Posted September 17, 2009 at 1:53 PM | Permalink

    I *am* responsible for how the OS is built, and we still use Windows.

    My approximate order of priorites for making stuff work is

    1) Symbian^3
    2) GCCE
    3) Building on Linux

    I’m hoping that most of the real work for 2 and 3 is done by the community, and I’ve posted some indications of what we can do to help make it happen.

  5. David Durant
    Posted September 17, 2009 at 1:56 PM | Permalink

    Hi William. That’s a good statement of intention. What I’d like to see is a simple table of the tools (perhaps broken down by type such as “compiler” or “dynamical analysis”) that are currently on offer from / recommended by Symbian with a column for Windows support, another for Mac support and finally for Linux support.

    That way we can easily see how far Symbian needs to go to really become a multi-platform development environment.