Learning Symbian Foundation

My previous blog post was a historical because it received two comments from its readers. Both comments were excellent and I decided to write blog post inspired by them. This is how collaboration works I wrote something and received comments and comments inspired me to write more. So here we go again 🙂

New Form of Collaboration

Symbian Ecosystem has been long time quite closed and everything related to Symbian was very confidential. Everybody who was working with Symbian/S60 code had to write NDAs to get access to source code. NDAs usually limits information changing and now those who have been taught to this model are amazed. What this mean, what open source mean, how this changes the game?

It changes a lot and everybody needs to understand the rules of open source, obey the community rules, start to play with community rules. I think that this is challenge also for those big multi-national corporations, that Slinky mentioned in his/her comment. They must also start to think differently and it takes time, everybody are learning how to play with new “open source rules” in Symbian Foundation.

What comes to “crowdsourcing” and challenges that can be solved by the crowd. It is also new thing in this ecosystem and if Symbian Foundation has same kind of service like InnoCentive. I would say that InnoCentive-kind of model would work also in Symbian Foundation. There are rules how “solvers” are rewarded if they have posted solution to the challenge.My opinion is that InnoCentive won’t be so popular if solvers won’t get paid. But still GOS has a point with time-to-market and “software is ready when it is ready”. I need to think this further 🙂

Attractiveness of Symbian Foundation

GOS mentioned in his/her comment Mozilla and Linux communities where contributors are very enthusiastic about the projects. I agree that Symbian Foundation may not be in that position but I bet that there are people who are enthusiastic about Symbian and they have will to develop it further. But it might be true that there is room for improvement in area of attractiveness of Symbian Foundation.

I bet that there are interesting projects in Symbian Foundation and its packages. The only impediment is that developers may not know where those interesting projects are located. That’s why I am thinking that Package Owners could spread more word, create buzz around package and try to gather contributions to own packages. I have read somewhere that only interesting projects will live in open source world.

Proper Open Source Community

Slinky pointed in his comment that Symbian Foundation is not yet proper open source community. Well, if we compare Symbian Foundation to Linux or Mozilla, they have decade long lead over Symbian Foundation. As mentioned earlier they may had challenges in starting the community and hopefully Symbian Foundation can learn from their mistakes. Symbian was not born in open source community but we can raise Symbian Foundation to well-bred open source community. It will not happen in one year it may take another year too. Fortunately we have those big multi-national companies that supports community and collaborate to make Symbian Foundation even better 🙂

That’s all from this week!