Order from open source chaos

Various videos and PDFs from the recent Symbian Partner Event are now available online.

One video that amply repays viewing is Jay Sullivan of Mozilla speaking on "Chaos and order: a Mozilla story". You'll find it on the presentations page of the SPE website.

Mozilla's declared mission - "promote choice and innovation on the Internet" - has a lot in common with what Symbian is trying to do. One size does not fit all. Mozilla's declared methods - involving open source, weak copyleft, and an independent foundation - also resonate with those of the Symbian Foundation. Even the sizes of the organisations are broadly comparable (Jay mentioned that Mozilla has around 175 employees).

Mozilla has been travelling along this particular road a lot longer than Symbian. This helps to explain why many Symbian people in the audience were hanging intently on every word in the presentation.

The questions that the presentation sought to answer included:

• How can your organisation harness openness (where more and more things happen in public), rather than fight it?
• How do you get your customers to support each other (peer-to-peer support), rather than always going to the centre for support?
• How can a comparatively small company take advantage of wide public support to compete with huge existing players?
• How can 75 developers inside the company leverage 100s of external daily contributors, 1000s of less frequent contributors, 10s of 1000s of overnight testers, and around one million beta testers?

In part, the answer to these questions is to use appropriate tools. For example, Mozilla relies heavily on the Bugzilla bug-tracking database.

In part, the answer comes down to attitude. Mozilla have adopted widespread openness of information sharing: they use wikis and newsgroups, which are almost all publicly accessible. (The exception is a small amount of personnel information.) Another example: Everyone in the world is able to dial into the company weekly status update meeting. (Jay commented: "We know our competition dials in".)

What I personally found most interesting was Jay's analysis of the potential chaos that ensues from this openness. For example, there can be a great deal of "noise" in the online comments from all sorts of people: it's hard to filter postings that are based on reality, from those based on speculation or fantasy. There's a constant trail of chat, with input from all over the world. Everyone can propose changes to the project. In such an environment, how can real work get done? How can you mediate among 50,000 people who all have ideas to improve a particular dialog box in the UI of an application? How to deal with strongly vocal minorities?

The answers were fascinating (and deeply practical):

• Open doesn't mean democracy
• Decision-making is messy (but that doesn't mean you should step back from openness)
• Be prepared to tolerate some messiness
• Treat disagreements as negotiations
• Managers of the project need to drive towards definite outcomes - focusing on what is the right outcome rather than who has the right ideas
• Organise a chorus (rather than a chaos), around local leaders
• Although anyone can propose changes, you need to earn significant amounts of credibility before you are allowed to implement a change
• Ensure quality through multiple reviews
• Review for performance regressions as well as for functionality
• Educate participants about the vision and the mission of the project, which in turn allows greater micro-level decisions
• Guide participants towards using the appropriate communication channels for particular topics, and to back up their assertions with research and data
• Create small focused teams with responsibility for specific areas of product interest
• Create a common language, to allow discussions to be more productive
• You still need to have clearly identified decision makers, even though you push as much of the discussion out "to the edge" as possible.

These are good thoughts to keep in mind in the midst of the inevitable turmoil as the Symbian Foundation places 40 million lines of code into open source (and makes corresponding changes in processes) over the next 18 months.

Accelerating the transformation

As noted by Tom Krazit of CNET News, there was lots more news from yesterday's Nokia World event than merely the buzz about the newly announced highly attractive N97. It was also announced that the acquisition of Symbian by Nokia has completed.

One practical impact of the completion of this deal is that preparation can now accelerate - for the forthcoming Symbian Foundation, and for the deep integration of the Symbian and S60 software engineering teams.

As Tom Krazit notes:

After entertaining the world press in Barcelona during the early part of this week, Symbian and Nokia executives will be in San Francisco later this week to discuss their plans for mobile computing and open source, and we'll have reports from the Symbian Partner Event on Thursday.

Personally, I'm about to board my flight to San Francisco for this event. I'm particularly looking forward to open and insightful discussion at this event - including the panel discussion on "Succeeding in the US: the key factors", where I'll be asking for comments and questions from the audience.

Just as I expect very significant amounts of wireless innovation to come from North America in the near future, I also expect very significant amounts to come, perhaps more in the future, from China. Later this month I'll be speaking at an event in Beijing, about "Symbian Platform Development". I'm looking forward to learning a lot - since I plan on listening as well as speaking :-)

In case anyone would like to try to meet up while I'm in San Francisco or in Beijing, please get in touch.

Footnote: There's still time to register for the Partner Event.

Symbian Partner Event, San Francisco, 4th Dec

Historically, admission to Symbian Partner Events has been restricted to signed-up members of Symbian's Partner Network. However, for our event at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on Thursday 4th December, we're going to open up participation.

Some parts of the day will still be restricted to signed partners. However, most of the proceedings on the day will be open to a wider group of attendees - such as mobile developers, journalists, the open source community, and representatives of companies that may be considering partnering with Symbian.

Space will be limited so anyone thinking of attending should register their interest as soon as possible via the event website.

Full details of speakers, panellists, and other sessions at the event will be published on the event website shortly. In the meantime, here are a few highlights:

• Keynote presentations from a leading member of the open source community, senior representatives from network operators and phone manufacturers, Symbian executives, and the management of the Symbian Foundation;
• "Fast Forward" technology seminars
• An open roundtable discussion on "Succeeding in the US: the key factors"
• "Symbian Foundation Platform Architecture Overview"
• "Symbian Foundation Q&A".

There will also be an exhibition of partner products and solutions, as well as ample opportunity to network with movers-and-shakers of the global mobile industry.

Footnote: Here's the LinkedIn entry for this event.

Open source coexistence with marvellous non-free add-ons

"Has Symbian thought open source through?" That's the question David Meyer of ZDNet asks this morning. David explains the context of his question:

Last week I visited Symbian's labs here in London. The assembled hacks were shown some very interesting stuff, such as what could be done with a quad core mobile chipset... There was also some cool stuff with mobile-based audio EQ, which always pleases me.

We also got shown some of the fruits of Symbian's work with Scalado on the graphics front. The engineer demonstrated very quick loading of and zooming into a 21-megapixel picture, which was very impressive but raised ... unanswered questions: ... what precisely is to happen with this valuable work once Symbian goes open source?

Given that [going open source] will involve stripping out all the third-party, proprietary stuff that can't go open source, why is Symbian still bothering with such partnerships?

Here's my answer. First, I'm sure that there are aspects of going open source which we in Symbian have yet to think through properly. Moving some 400,000 files of source code into open source is bound to pose a whole host of unexpected problems. However, this particular question is one that has received considerable thought.

The highly impressive Scalado mobile imaging software which Symbian licensed earlier this year is only one of a large number of add-on or plug-in solutions which are available, either as part of Symbian OS itself, or as a pre-integrated supplementary solution. For obvious reasons, I won't say anything more about Scalado, but I'll address the general question of an add-on solution A from vendor V, which may be included in a phone created by customer C of Symbian. Suppose that A is currently subject to a license fee F, which is payable:

• Either from C direct to V,
• Or from Symbian to V, with the costs in this case currently being covered as part of the Symbian OS licence fee paid by C to Symbian.

So what happens to this licence fee F once the Symbian platform becomes open source, and there's no longer any licence fee for Symbian platform?

It turns out there are quite a few options available.

For example, the Symbian platform may exclude A, but may instead include a more basic version A0. This will be good enough for many purposes - and will allow customers to build many kinds of successful phones. But customers who want particularly responsive or feature-rich behaviour in the area covered by A will be able to pay fee F directly to V, and will apply A in place of A0 in their phones. So long as the code for A is independent of the Symbian platform code for A0 (in legal terms, so long as A is not a derivative work of A0), there's no obligation on V to licence their code using the EPL applicable to the Symbian platform itself. That is, they won't need to make their source code available.

Is this somehow at variance with the motivation of Symbian in creating an open source platform? It depends what you think the primary motivation is for this move. If you think that motivation is to drive out all cost from phones, you may be surprised by this option. However, once you realise that the main drivers are actually to lower barriers of entry and experimentation, to boost innovation, to deepen collaboration, to raise quality, and to accelerate time-to-market, you won't be so surprised. Open source does not imply low-value! And nor does open source imply that anything which builds on top of it, needs to be zero cost.

Another option is that vendor V will make A available royalty-free as part of the open source platform, but will earn revenues:

• From consultancy work in the area of A
• Or, from making available a chargeable new version A1 that provides even better performance and/or new features.

In short, there will be plenty of ways for creative partner companies to continue to earn handsome income from their add-on and plug-in solutions to Symbian platform software.

I'll close by returning to the last part of the initial question: "...why is Symbian still bothering with such partnerships?" It's because these partnerships collectively generate a huge quantity of impressive add-on and plug-in solutions, which allow our customers to customise and optimise their phones in numerous ways. And that's good for everyone.