Going Open Source Not Enough To Attract Non-Paid Developers To Symbian

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James Quintana Pearce

mocoNews.net
Wednesday, July 23, 2008; 5:59 PM

One of Nokia's ( NYSE: NOK) reasons for making Symbian open source was to drive innovation by attracting developers. Symbian is still associated almost exclusively with Nokia, and the organization is aware this could be a problem with vp of strategy John Forsyth telling OSCON that "the rapidly forming group needs a "clean-room culture" with its own offices, and populated by technical experts from handset- and service-vendor members who don't simply echo their masters' corporate voice" reports The Register.

Company blog Nokia Conversations has a piece indicating that it may not be that simple. The post quotes Nokia developer Janne Jalkanen (who apparently didn't realise it was an interview and described his comments as a rant) saying: "I doubt that open sourcing Symbian is going to help in the community building though. There are two kinds of OSS developers: the guys who do things for fun, and the guys who do OSS because they are paid to do so. In order for an open source project to really flourish and take over the world, you need both...The problem with Symbian is that very, very few people touch it for fun." This is a personal view, not the official company line. (via El Reg)

He seems to think taking it open source was a good idea on the whole (his manure analogy is priceless) but reckons that Nokia?or I guess, the Symbian Foundation?will have to do a lot more to get in the hobbyist coders.

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