Comments on: An inside (personal) view of the Symbian deal

By: Oren Levine

Oren Levine — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:25:30 +0000

Janne may be right that not many developers will work on Symbian for fun. That doesn’t mean, however, that it will fail as an open source project. The most successful open source projects, like Apache, Eclipse, and even Webkit, get much or most of their contributions from paid professional developers working for big companies (like IBM, Apple, or Nokia). They’re not doing the work “for fun,” but because their companies have decided that open source serves their business objectives.

If you’re looking for an open source project that does attract developers working for “fun”, take a look at Python on S60. Again, most of the heavy lifting is being done by Nokia employees, but this open source venture has attracted a very enthusiastic community of pros and semi-pros who are doing all sorts of interesting and odd things. (http://mobilenin.com for example)

I think the Python experience, not to mention other S60 developer communities (around Java, for instance), prove that Janne is off the mark when he writes that “the only community around S60 is the community we pay to be there.”

By: Stephane Landier

Stephane Landier — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:38:27 +0000

Sander,
I agree with what you say, but what if AVKON was not going to be the prefered API anymore ? With the purchase of Trolltech & QT, and the visibility which is being given to OpenC and various runtime frameworks, I guess we can have a fair idea where NOKIA is heading.

By: Sander van der Wal

Sander van der Wal — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:28:59 +0000

IMHO, a lot of the problems people have with Symbian are not the Symbian OS itself, but S60/Avkon. Avkon is indeed a pig to program for, because there are too many ways to do something.

Take dialog for example. There’s the plain CEikDialog, CAknDialog, CAknForm, loads of query and note dialogs, and settings views, which are behaving exactly like dialogs.

And that’s the second big problem, documentation. Symbian/S60 is a fill-in-the-blanks system, you add specific functionality by subclassing and fleshing out Template methods. For this to work you need excellent documentation, because you need to know exactly what the framework itself does and what you must add.

Back to the article, the problems people have with Symbian/S60 are not going away when the system becomes Open Source. Having the source will make debugging a bit easier, but without good documentation the bulk of the design and coding effort will be as big as it is now.

Keeping the OS and S60 developing further does require lots of well-paid people. And even though the OS/UI might not be where the value is, a phone without a proper OS doesn’t work. Nokia now spends a bit less on the OS than it did when it licensed it, but doesn’t seem to me to become less dependent on Symbian.