I’m Tom Pritchard, Connectivity Technology Manager for Symbian. I’ve been around Symbian for some time and have been to many Symbian events in the past with mixed pleasure but, for me, SEE09 was a joy – it was exactly what an open source exchange of ideas should be about.
I had many meetings set up which were all very productive, but what I really want to talk about is the more impromptu things that came out of the expo – chiefly, two unexpected potential contributions from new potential members.
Firstly, I was at the Symbian Ideas stand talking with some great people from the ecosystem when I was introduced to two developers, Leon and Zoran, from OpenCode. They make a USSD product but were having some problems with their solution on Symbian and wanted to talk about what they can do to improve this.
It wasn’t long before I was sitting down with them and Nithin Vijay, the package owner for Cellular Baseband Services, seeing a demo of their product and talking about the direction that Nithin would like to take for USSD, but doesn’t have the resources to do.
This struck a chord with Leon and Zoran and they were keen to help out with the implementation if they could. For me this is the exemplar of open source collaboration: OpenCode are able to build a better end product, the package owner gets a new feature delivered and the Symbian platform grows and improves.
Secondly, I was just walking into the media lounge and Lars Kurth, Contributor Community Manager at the foundation, grabs me to say he’d like me to meet someone from the makers of a range of bluetooth stacks, applications and devices.
Once again, I was shortly sitting down with a potential contributor and a package owner – this time Sander Van Valkenburg (bluetooth & bluetooth services) – talking about accelerating the roadmap for Bluetooth 3.0 High Speed.
This is also exactly the kind of win-win-win situation that we want to bring to the community: A member can more easily integrate their applications and peripherals, a package owner gets new features delivered and the Symbian platform takes another leap forward in functionality.
I look forward to welcoming these new members to the Symbian community and I hope you will welcome the contributions that they can bring.
Bluetooth 3.0 + HS would be a big thing to bring in at the beginning of a new open source project.
The old adage of walking before running is apt here – should not potential contributors be proposing/contributing small items of work and defect fixes first?
There’s a lot to learn in Symbian OS subsystems – how will that occur for a high quality contribution? What are the plans, in general for that kind of learning?
@Too Blueth – Yes, this is a really important point to bring out: high quality is of course a key factor in all contributions, something which Symbian has spent many years striving for.
Symbian provides a “Feature Codeline” (FCL) mechanism which allows for development to be done in the open and continual review to take place before a contribution is accepted into the platform by the package owner – who is ultimately responsible for the quality of that code.
What was so valuable in this case was that it was possible to sit down with a potential contributor and the package owner to discuss how this might fit within the architecture along with the review process we might go through to ensure that we can move the platform forward, whilst maintaining the high quality stack that’s been built up over the years.
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