Submitted by Nokia has just posted that it has completed putting the Symbian source code online at symbian.nokia.com. This means that both company-supported and independent developers can now access the Symbian source code again, after the effective closure of the Symbian Foundation. This follows the interim measure of FTP access to Symbian Foundation hosted content being given out on request.
now you KNOW it’s dead.
Well I don’t think anyone was doubting that Symbian had met its end…
It is good practice on Nokia’s part that they are releasing the source code at EOL as this will allow those who have deployments to at least service themselves once Nokia’ winds up it Symbian operations. Well done!
Symbian is far from EOL, despite of the interpretations about feb 11 you have read on the net.
… on a chain and with a hook inside.
The new license isn’t exactly a liberating one. From Groklaw:
______________
“Symbian was fully open sourced back in February of 2010. How about now? Did it turn out as you would expect from such a promise of an open model? Here’s the license, the new one. Scroll down to “NOKIA SYMBIAN LICENSE VERSION 1.0″ at the bottom of the page, and what do we find? There’s no patent grant. That jumps off the page immediately. And here’s the Copyright License:
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Nokia hereby grants to You a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, irrevocable (except as set forth in Clause 7.1 and 7.2 below), royalty-free and worldwide license under Copyrights licensable by Nokia to: i) reproduce and modify Source Code Components; ii) reproduce Binary Components and Documentation; iii) use and reproduce Utility Software, and iv) publicly display, distribute and make available (a) the Source Code Components to third parties that have acquired a valid source code license from Nokia; and (b) Utility Software, Binary Components and Source Code Components in binary form to third parties, (c) Documentation in unmodified form in all cases i)-iv) solely as part of the Symbian Platform or for use with the Symbian Platform, under the terms and conditions of this Agreement.
You may have third parties to perform the above rights for you, provided that such third parties agree to be bound by the terms of this Agreement, and You agree to be liable for their activities under this Agreement, as if they were Your employees.
You could do that much back in the day with proprietary UNIX. There is also a no-reverse-engineering clause:
You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble any of the Binary Components, except to the extent allowed by the mandatory provisions of the applicable law.
And the cherry on top?
4. CONFIDENTIALITY
4.1 Confidentiality Undertaking
Subject to rights granted in Section 3.1 above, the Source Code Components are confidential information of Nokia and/or its licensors (“Confidential Informationâ€). Further, You expressly acknowledge and agree that: i) You shall keep the Confidential Information as strictly confidential and provide limited access to Confidential Information only to those of Your employees and subcontractors for whom such access is necessary for the performance of this Agreement; and ii) You shall not, without the prior written permission of Nokia, disclose the Confidential Information to any third party. The confidentiality obligations of this Section 4 shall remain in force for a period of five (5) years from the date of disclosure of Confidential Information.
4.2 Exceptions
The above confidentiality undertaking shall not apply to Confidential Information, which: (a) is required to be disclosed by mandatory provisions of law, order or regulation of a governmental authority or a court of competent jurisdiction,; or (b) as proven by Your written records, certifiably: i) was publicly available at the time of disclosure or later became publicly available without breach of above confidentiality undertaking, including without limitation any information made lawfully publicly available by the Symbian Foundation; or ii) was disclosed by a third party without breach of any confidentiality undertaking; iii) was in Your possession prior to disclosure of the Confidential Information under this Agreement; or iv) was independently developed by You without use of any Confidential Information.”
___________
Regardless of what you may think of PJ or her opinions the licenses speak for themselves. Subject to any future legal actions anyway. (;
… you can still get the code under the previous license from Sourceforge.
In case anyone is still tracking/reading this thread Carlo Daffara has made an Archive of Symbian available.
From his blog:
“Symbian: Ah, symbian. I already wrote about the high and lows of the Symbian OSS project, and since Nokia plans to shut down everything and make the source code accessible only through a direct request for an USB key or DVD, I though that an internet accessible archive would have been more… modern. It is a substantial, massive archive – I had to drop all Mercurial additions to make it fit in the space I had available, and still it amounts to 6.1Gb, Bzip-compressed. It is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbiandump/files/.
I have performed no modifications or changes on the source code, and it remains under its original licenses. I hope that it may be useful for others, or at least become a nice historical artifact.”
Still much better than what MS did to Windows Mobile 6.5. They just left all the community as well as the developers and handset manufacturers to their fates, and completely abandoned the platform. The replacement: something new with no backwards compatibility, no way to cross-develop (ala Cocoa on MacOS 9/X), and much less features (breaking: copy-and-paste is coming this month!).
Although I had been a loyal MS customer, I’m very happy with my current Android 2.2 phone. At least I can hope there is a future.
AFAIK WM6.5 phones were still in production not long ago.
So, guess, MS is still licencing it to those who might need it.
The car navigation producers come in mind…
Yeah the still license it but would you as a developer really want to develop for a platform that will not be improved or included on new hardware?
Symbian seems like it will be better supported, as in nokia will continue to introduce new handsets with symbian while they figure out what they want to do with windows 7 phone. As a consumer, I would not consider buying a nokia phone with symbian. Therefore, as a developer, I will not develop for it.
If you develop w/ Qt, you are not stuck with Symbian alone.
As an example, check out this vid w/ Symbian & Galaxy Tab running the same native Qt apps:
http://cutehacks.com/2011/04/04/cutehacks-on-android/
Oh yeah, I’m keeping a very close eye on that. I would *love* to develop in qt for android. If it happens to work on other platforms that I have less confidence in, so much the better.
As far as I know, when Nokia took control of Symbian, one of the goals was to open it up.
Symbian was open sourced and made available in the Foundation times. This is a step backwards.
Hopefully someone will step in and fix some of the annoying bugs that both the mail app and Ovi Social have. I fear that by the time I have learned enough QT and related technologies I won’t even have my N8 anymore.
Certainly took them long enough, but they seem to have a much better plan in place this time. The foundation was a nice idea, but I think it makes more sense to have the code living closer to the people that are actually working on it. Now they stand a chance of actually folding in some of the code from outside Nokia.