From Symbian Developer Community

The aim was to hold a catch-all BoF about Symbian and Linux. It was presented as:

Where does Symbian fit in the Linux dominated open source world? What is our relative strength? How can we work together? How can we make Symbian phones interoperate with Linux? How can we get Linux developers on board?

Attendance

About 10 people attended the BoF, some leaving and coming during the hour. We had very different people there, from hard core kernel guys and Maemo experts to product managers at Nokia and third party developers and even an end user.

Kernel talk

The first 15 minutes or so were about the two kernels, and how they compare. There is an interest here, so we could do more kernel sessions next year. Nobody seemed to be able to really compare the kernels when it comes to speed and battery management etc. I think it would be good to have some hard data here.

Symbian on MIDs, tablets and desktop

There was a brief discussion about where Symbian could go outside of mobile phones.

Flashing of phones and through Linux

The issue of being able to flash your own firmware on your device came up. We patiently await an open Symbian device. Would it be possible to run Symbian on N900?

People who use Linux complain about needing Windows to flash their phone. The same goes for syncing of contacts etc. Hopefully things will improve here.

Maemo and Android

Obviously, there was interest in Maemo. People who attend SEE are reasonably aware of Symbian, but there is a sense that Nokia is trying to phase it out. This was sternly denied by the Nokia people attending, which was good.

Android was mentioned many times. Again we lack hard data about relative merits.

Licensing

Another issue discussed was that of licenses, and why we can't take in GPL code in EPL. This is a confusing area for many, who think that "open source" is a license.

Summary

I was happy with the attendance, and we should put on something similar next year. We didn't necessarily address the questions posed, but many others were discussed. It ended up being a generic open source BoF, so maybe that's what it should be called next year.

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