Member Priorities to Drive Foundation
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Moreover, Rivas said what Nokia is talking about has not been done before.
"Our development process will take place in the open-source mode, and
we'll be accepting contributions from the entire industry."
And the foundation's development priorities will be driven by member
contributions. "We will encourage and enforce contributions with the
Eclipse license," he said, noting that the foundation will use the Eclipse
Public License as its primary licensing vehicle.
The fee to join the Symbian Foundation is $1,500. But the foundation itself
is funded by its original equipment manufacturer board members. The 10 founding
foundation members are Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, Vodafone,
AT&T, NTT Docomo, Texas Instruments and
ST-NXP Wireless.
"The act of taking 40-plus million lines of code and turning it into
open-source software will take some time, and we don't want to wait,"
Rivas said. "So on Day One we're making it all free for members. The
assets will be delivered as open source with an aggressive schedule starting at
the foundation's launch."
Meanwhile, Rivas said the foundation is applying more of a carrot than a
stick to encourage members to use the standard Symbian OS and S60 platform
rather than to fragment the software.
"The foundation will run a fairly broad set of tools to deal with
fragmentation and run a strong branding program," Rivas said. "We
hope to keep you from forking by having a high value system. But if you want to
fork you can fork; we have a license for that called the EPL."
Rivas had generally positive things to say about the Android offering, but he
was much less effusive about Apple's iPhone, despite carrying a Mac. "They
do everything for themselves and see no value in an open platform," he
said. "We believe in product differentiation, and this platform has to
make it possible for folks to make it unique. We believe there's a lot of value
in more than one manufacturer driving the development."
That said, Rivas noted that the foundation as it
stands has the support of seven device manufacturers, 225 million devices, 250
device models, 250 operators, tens of thousands of applications, and 4 million
developers.
