We've had some really great developments for open source on Symbian OS in the last couple of months, most of them have already been reported but I thought I'd do a quick summary and look at what's still needed.

We had Open C/C++ to let us write standard C/C++ code on Symbian, now we've got Qt on the way too.  Thanks to another poster on the discussion boards I can now point to a public source that says we have GStreamer being ported to Symbian as well: http://www.scribd.com/doc/40648/S60-Extending-the-Internet-Ilari-Nurmi-Nokia (page 9).  As Paul reported on Thursday, Mobile Firefox is also coming to Symbian OS, and that should mean more libraries (such as Cairo) coming with it.  The more building blocks and frameworks we get in place, the easier it is to port other applications and libraries.

Very rapidly we're getting to the situation where we have a Linux-like user space environment on top of the Symbian OS kernel.  To me this seems like the ideal combination for open source in mobile (I think it's going to take a few years for embedded Linux efforts to make it a serious contender in terms of power consumption and support for phone hardware, particularly at the lower end - single chip devices - and top end - the way SMP is supported needs to be quite different than for the desktop).

Now that Nokia's acquisition of Symbian has been approved, the way is clear for the Symbian Foundation and opening of the Symbian/S60 code.  As long as most of the big players in the mobile industry can be the "good open source citizens" that Nokia is trying to be then eventually Symbian & Linux should just be different open OS's that you build all open source mobile projects for.  There are still some things that need sorting out before we get there though:

1) Tools - Carbide.c++ v2.0 becoming free is a fantastic piece of news and a big step in the right direction.  However, it's still tied to Windows and the majority of open source developers (and indeed good embedded software engineers in my experience) would rather not use Microsoft OS's if they don't have to (putting it mildly).  Being Eclipse based, Carbide.c++ could theoretically move to Linux, although we'll need the (strongly rumoured but not much publicly discussed) simulator to replace the Windows emulator and some fixes to the SDK.  I'm not sure how Windows-specific the on-device debugging tools are either but I expect some work is required there.  This same point was made by Joel West recently.

2) Symbian Signed - I'm expecting further change here at some point since no other platform has this kind of clumsy headache of a system; it just can't be allowed to continue for too long.  It would be nice to hear some official comment about reforms, even if they're going to take a while to implement.  The current system is decidedly unfriendly to open source and there's really a need to stick to projects that don't need anything other than user-grantable capabilities.

However, I'm really pleased at the pace of progress with the mobile software world opening up.  So much so that I think it's worth working on some big open source projects on Symbian now (and clearly Mozilla agree!).... watch this space for my first one....

Mark