Q&A: the pain of open-sourcing Symbian

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 5 Feb 2010 at 15:14

When Nokia bought Symbian in 2008 and promptly announced that it was going to open-source the world’s most popular mobile OS, the news caught many by surprise.

Two years later and four months ahead of schedule, the Symbian Foundation – established to oversee the project – has reviewed and turned over 40 million lines of code to the Symbian community. We speak with the man charged with making that happen, John Forsyth, part of the Symbian Foundation’s Leadership Team.

Q Open-sourcing a proprietary platform the size of Symbian must have been a massive task. What was the biggest hurdle along the way?

A To be honest the biggest challenges are cultural. It’s not just a process of taking static code and moving it onto a different server after having some lawyers look at it. That’s part of it, but what you’re really doing is taking a bunch of human beings who work on a live code base that is their livelihood, and saying ‘you used to do this in private, so when you screwed up, or couldn’t figure out the solution to something, or made a bad choice, or were doing something that was a great idea and you didn’t want your competitors to know, it was behind closed doors. It’s all different now’.

We're doing this in the open... having rocks thrown at you because maybe your code isn’t as good as some guy who’s not even working for a company

We’re doing this in the open, where you’ve got to start networking within the community, having rocks thrown at you because maybe your code isn’t as good as some guy who’s not even working for a company, who’s a graduate student and could have fixed this hole you haven’t even spotted.

Q You touched on the Symbian community. Have you found them supportive of this move?

A We’ve encountered a lot of goodwill. The foundation has a staff of 100, but they're doing a lot of stuff: running developer programs and creating toolkits and so on. The collection of individuals solely focused on [open-sourcing Symbian] has been a dozen or less, but the number of people who’ve worked on it from the wider community has spiralled into the hundreds. They’re really passionate, it’s been fantastic to call on that.

Q Now the project’s over, what’s the role of the Symbian Foundation?

A We exist to run an open-source project, so until the entire platform’s open sourced we can’t say we’re doing that. Because Symbian came from a proprietary background some of the tools involved in using Symbian are commercially based. We want everything around Symbian to be free and open source.

We want to work on the tool chain. Then we have to show that we’re real. I’m horribly realistic about this, and there are plenty of cynics and other platforms people are more convinced by. We can’t write the code, we have to get great contributions and make sure that other people can see Symbian’s gathering momentum.

Q What part does Nokia have to play in this?

A Nokia has been contributing features into the Symbian code that haven’t yet appeared in its own products. We know that there’s a big UI overhaul coming, and that’s going to be visible on our servers before it’s visible in its products. These things are self-reinforcing. When you have a device maker investing in the platform, that encourages others to invest time in the platform, making it more valuable to the device maker. That’s the feedback loop we’re aiming for.