Symbian Blog: Articles by timholbrow

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Can you feel it?

Apr 2nd by timholbrow Retweet Share on Facebook

Anyone visiting our offices in 1 Boundary Row in London or 1051 E Hillsdale Blvd in Foster City, California might notice a different feel about the place today. If so, it could be a spark of pure open source flowing through the buildings following the completion of the transfer of their leases to the Symbian Foundation.

Today we have completed an asset transfer agreement with Nokia that transfers not only the leases (and the furniture and IT equipment within them), but also all of the ‘Symbian’ related trademarks and domain names that Nokia acquired through its purchase of Symbian Software Limited last year. This is great news as it allows the Symbian Foundation to take independent steps forward in its set up process. The refit of 1 Boundary Row has already begun with a new reception being built, strongly influenced by the foundation brand, and we’ll be doing similar things in Foster City in the next couple of months.

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Expertly Controlled

Apr 2nd by timholbrow Retweet Share on Facebook

It may come as a surprise to some people that the Symbian Platform is considered by many governments to be ‘dual-use’ i.e., a technology that has both military and civilian uses. Specifically, it is the strong cryptography algorithms that can be found within the security technology domain that are considered to have possible military use (I’ll leave it to the Evil Geniuses to work out the specifics).

The practical implication of this is that the platform falls under the UK Government’s Export Control regime. Under the current Symbian Foundation License, we need to a) get a license to export code to a particular country or member, and b) keep records of who we have exported the code to. In many cases this is pretty simple, there is an agreement which makes it easy for us to export to EU countries and we have obtained a ‘CGEA’ license to cover 7 more (USA, Japan, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand). Clearly the Symbian Foundation has global reach so we need to be able to export outside of this limited list, for this we need to apply for export licenses to individual member sites, and also (under a slightly longer process) to other countries as a whole.

Fortunately the UK government (through UKTI and BERR) are being extremely supportive of the Symbian Foundation cause, but the process will take a little time. What companies applying to be members will see is a little extra admin during the membership process and potentially some, hopefully short, delay in code being able to reach certain global sites.

The good news is that our current understanding is that under the EPL export control will no longer apply since the code will be in the public domain – yet another great reason to move all packages to EPL as quickly as we can!

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