Symbian Foundation websites closed

As mentioned in Jay’s previous post in November, today marks the official close of the Symbian foundation websites. While most of our readers likely never had much experience with or exposure to these websites, they posed a major resource for a lot of curious cats like myself who wanted to keep track of progress on Symbian development as well as contribute ideas for improvements and/or features that we wanted to see in the platform. Nokia has created their own Symbian blog which in due course is expected to be populated with news etc. concerning the platform progress, releases and projects being undertaken that are related to Symbian.

However, all indications point towards a more closed system of development being undertaken.Whether this is done in a similar manner to the Google Android method where code dumps are made regularly and changes made at the whim of the company overseeing development remains to be seen. This, however, is both a positive and negative in that the closed system has somewhat less red tape and bureaucracy standing between ideas/concepts and the realization and productizing of these concepts. Unfortunately this comes at the cost of valuable community feedback and input. Simply looking at the number of great and well supported ideas that were submitted to the Symbian Ideas site (now unavailable of course) is testament to the benefit of using collective intelligence and outside ideas.

Statement by Tim Holbrow, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation after the break:

“In 2009, we established the Symbian Foundation to make the Symbian platform available open source and royalty-free. In November 2010 we announced that the foundation would ramp down its operational activities as a result of changes in global economic and market conditions.

We are now well underway with transitioning the foundation from a non-profit organisation responsible for governing the open development and curation of the Symbian platform, to a licensing entity with no permanent staff. Moving forward, the foundation will be responsible only for specific licensing and legal frameworks put in place during the open sourcing of the platform.

The Symbian platform will continue to evolve under Nokia, who have committed to make the future development of the platform available via an alternative direct and open model.

Due to this transition, many of the operations and services the foundation provided to the Symbian community have now ceased. With the exception of this blog site, the foundation’s public websites have closed, along with open access to the Symbian source code.

However, much of the foundation’s data is available to the public via FTP until 31 March 2011. For access to this content, please e-mail contact@symbian.org. Some content is still controlled under certain licenses; Symbian Foundation members will continue to have access to Symbian Foundation License content.

Specifically, the FTP site will allow access to:

1. Current platform source code
2. Platform Development Kits:
   • S^2 PDK 2.0.3 (parts of S^2 are only available to current Symbian Foundation members)
   • S^3 PDK 3.0.4
   • S^4 PDK 4.0.a
3. Databases:
   • Database exports from Bugzilla, Wiki, Forums, Ideas and Symbian Horizon.
     NOTE: all private, personal information has been removed
4. Documentation:
   • HTML source for the platform reference documentation and public mailing lists

Access to the FTP site will cease on 31 March 2011; by this date we anticipate a new model for hosting Symbian code will be available from Nokia.

You can find more information on Nokia’s plans for Symbian at http://symbian.nokia.com. Forum Nokia is the best place to access developer support for Symbian, including tools, documentation, technical support, and discussion boards.

We would like to extend our deepest thanks to everyone who contributed to the major milestones achieved at the Symbian Foundation. We can all be proud of these accomplishments – some not seen before in the history of computing, such as the completion of the largest transition to open source of any commercial codebase in software history. We would also like to extend warm thanks to the entire member community for their continued commitment to the Symbian platform.

We are confident that these are absolutely the right changes in the context of today’s market and economy, and we look forward to watching a new era of success for the Symbian platform unfold.”

Via

Category: 3rd edition, 5th Edition, Aquisitions, Nokia, Press Release, S60, Symbian