Wow. In case you missed it, Nokia bought up the rest of Symbian (it was already a major investor there) and have united with a number of Symbian stakeholders to form the Symbian Foundation to which Nokia will be contributing the Symbian OS. And from there, they will be working to provide an open source, EPL licensed, version of it.
Wow. We have CDT committers from both Nokia and Symbian and they are a great bunch. I still haven't figured out whether this is a good thing or not, but it certainly stirs up the pot as far as open source mobile platforms go. I think it also helps secure the future of the Symbian OS as a technology. It's hard to compete against the hype of Google Android and at the very least this will give Symbian some attention.
It'll also be interesting to see what kind of community evolves for it. They've certainly seeded it with companies that have a vested interest in Symbian's success. That'll give them a good start. As we all know in Eclipse-land, it's a lot of work to grow a community. But maybe growth isn't the prime objective here. We'll have to wait and see what the pundits say, but going open seems to be the most popular strategy these days to help ensure sure your platform matters. Mind you that may be the Google-envy speaking ;)
Fantastic!
ReplyDeleteThat's really big news for the EPL... it validates the license in a new area.
Yeah, which conflicts with other things that I've been hearing where EPL is troublesome as a run-time license. But maybe there were other reasons for that concern...
ReplyDeleteThe problem with the runtimes is that there is a lot of GPL'd stuff out there which causes the conflict. In the CDT world, I'm sure you came across issues where say something from Linux is GPL'd and you can't bundle that code.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm sure that's why they picked EPL, much more commercial friendly.
ReplyDeleteNot sure what you mean by 'bundle'. Everyone bundles GPL and EPL and commercial code. No issues with that. You just got to watch when something you are doing becomes 'derived' and there are some well understood guidelines that would probably stand up in court about where that line is.
Time for the deprogramming ;)
Where are these well understood guidelines for bundling GPL code?
ReplyDeleteOff topic Doug, but your comment relates to a discussion we are currently having:
We have an issue with two things -
Customers who would like to use a GPL DirectShow video CODEC along with our commercial code. This seems do-able but I don't think I can distribute the CODEC, the customer has to get it themselves.
Second is a customer who want to automate a process. The process uses a GPL application and the automation could be supplied by our scheduler. However, that means I need to add a SOAP interface to the GPL app to enable the automation - is the scheduler now a derived work?
IANAL so please check other sources.
ReplyDeleteBut as far as I understand. If you have a GPL work and you link it into your program, your program is derived. i.e. if it's in you're program's address space it's derived. Calling a GPL work that is out of process seems to be OK. That's what we do when we call gcc and gdb from the CDT.
This is where LGPL is much better since you can dynamically link with the LGPL work, i.e. load at run time. The key is that the user should be able to make changes to that work and replace the version you're using with their own. Which isn't a really good idea but it's 'free'...
Again, I am not a lawyer and this is just my interpretation, which I seem to share with quite a few people.
Hi, you’ve got an interesting blog. I like it and I like Nokia. I had several cell phones and Nokia turned out to be the best of them. Although they say it is one of the most harmful phones in terms of human health but still it is great. On this great site www.pissedconsumer.co I read a lot about the company and its products feedbacks.
ReplyDelete