Mark Wilcox's Forum Nokia Blog

Random musings on mobile software development...

Trolltech, Linux, Open Source, the future?

Sorcery-ltd | 03 February, 2008 18:56

I've had a week to let the Trolltech news sink in so I thought I'd share my thoughts on it.

There's been a lot of discussion of Nokia's latest acquisition on the web. A number of Linux & FOSS fans are talking about the demise of Symbian. Some Symbian fans are confused by the move and worried about the nightmare of yet more fragmentation in the mobile developer space. There are also Maemo fans who are worried that Nokia is changing direction. The most sensible take I've seen on this comes from Nokia's own Quim Gill, manager of the Maemo platform.

Hardly anyone seems to be talking about the obvious benefit - PIPS and Open C on Symbian allow easier porting of open source projects BUT you still have to write the UI in native Symbian code. For an open source developer that means they still need to learn Symbian C++ and the S60 UI (which in my opinion is by far the worst bit of Symbian programming and the least well documented). Adding Qt to S60 to provide an alternative UI option opens the way for a lot more applications to be ported. If you look at the proliferation of completely free software available on Maemo (which adds enormous value to that platform) and compare it to what you can get for free on Symbian then I think you can only see this move as a good thing. Symbian APIs will probably still be required for specialist phone functionality, at least for a while, although I expect most developers won't need to care that the underlying OS is Symbian (apart from signing and PlatSec issues).

The next bonus is a clear intention (from the pretty pictures being presented as a background to the acquisition) to make a version of the Qt framework available on S40 - hopefully allowing much easier porting of applications to a truly enormous number of devices. I expect that, at least initially, this will be the Java version of Qt but perhaps one day we'll see C/C++ APIs opened up on S40, possibly sandboxed on a separate core on a next generation chip like this one from Broadcom? Maybe we'll even see S40 applications move to a Linux platform on such dual core chips eventually - the cost of the necessary processing power, RAM & Flash has fallen so fast it seems very possible.

The other advantage(?) of an open source framework from the perspective of a company like Nokia could be that it requires very little if any documentation. If you really need to find out some fine detail you can just look at the code (or ask someone who already understands it). As software platforms grow in complexity and generally tend to evolve more than they're designed, maintaining good developer documentation (particularly if you don't have any in the first place) is increasingly difficult, time-consuming and expensive. If you document as you go it increases time to market (because only the people writing the code understand it at that point). Third party developers can't wait for documentation after you've delivered the products because that impacts their time to market. So, if you want to continuously evolve and improve the platform then the simplest solution would seem to be to open up the source code!

It's my hope that this acquisition signals more openness in the future from Nokia. Both in terms of opening up new APIs and sharing more source code.

Thanks for reading and please share what you think the future holds in terms of Nokia, Linux & Openness?

Mark