Google said today that it has released the code behind the Android operating system as open source, a day before the Android-based T-Mobile G1 phone is scheduled to go on sale.
The Open Handset Alliance includes some 34-members including phone manufacturers like HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG Electronics and recently Kyocera and carriers like T-Mobile, Sprint and China Mobile.
So far the pickings are sparse at the Android Market:
- AccuTracking turns your Android cell phone into a GPS tracking device.
- Imeem a mobile Internet radio service, which lets you stream Internet radio channels that match up with your taste.
- MySpace Mobile lets you browse a lo-fi version of MySpace.
- Mobeedo provides situation-specific information or services.
- The Weather Channel.
- Life 360 a multi-channel messaging system and neighborhood-centric social network
Google has released the complete Android mobile operating system stack under the open-source Apache license, freeing up carriers, OEMs and ambitious application development experts to build functional smart phones with the software. Anyone can contribute to Android and influence its direction. The Open Handset Alliance and the open-source community believe this platform, which may be adopted by many different hardware companies and cellular/wireless providers, may soon become ubiquitous.
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There are many open-source licensing models.
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The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL)-licensed code make no compromises. They operate under guidelines such as “We give you the code for free. If you change it or improve it, you must give your work back to the community.”
- The Apache license model is practiced by Google’s Android platform. It does not demand that every manufacturer and mobile operator must give their own innovations back to the community.
- The Eclipse Public License (EPL) is used by Symbian Foundation. It sits in the middle of the two contrasting open-source licensing models, GNU and Apache. The receiver of EPL-licensed programs can use, modify, copy and distribute the work and modified versions, but in some cases they are obligated to release their own changes.
Nokia announced earlier this year that it would acquire the rest of Symbian and offer its S60 and Symbian operating system for free to the open source community. The Symbian Foundation, a not-for-profit organization has been set up to manage all the assets related to Symbian, will take a phased-in approach. The foundation is expected to start operating during the first half of 2009. Membership of the foundation will be open to all organizations, for a low annual membership fee of US $1,500.
But taking a valuable business like the Symbian OS to the open-source community is not risk-free, said David Rivas, Nokia’s vice president, S60 product and technology management.
By the first half of 2010, the Symbian Foundation will be ready to go open source. Before that time, Foundation members can use the Foundation’s intellectual property assets, but will not be allowed to redistribute them, according to EE Times.
As for launching its assets into the open source community, Rivas stressed, “This is not a social experiment. The development priorities will be driven by the Foundation members, and they are driven by business decisions of everyone involved,” he said,
Nokia acquired Trolltech, an open source company, in June 2008. Trolltech changed its name to Qt Software after the company was folded into Nokia. Although the significance of Qt Software’s acquisition to Nokia and to the future Symbian Foundation was never fully explained until now, Nokia announced Monday the porting of Qt to S60 on Symbian OS.
The move will “accelerate Nokia’s cross-platform software strategy,” said Benoit Schillings, chief technologist at Qt Software. Further, it will bring to Nokia “new developers in the open source community” who have worked with Qt.
Qt, based on a C++ application development framework, is designed to make it easy for developers to create applications once, regardless of whether they were originally developed for mobile devices or desktop PCs, and deploy them on any of the Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile and embedded Linux platforms.
S60 and Symbian OS will become Symbian Foundation assets, and QT hopes to bring “harmony, consistency and efficiency” to the cross-platform environment.
Nokia is hoping that this will attract more developers to work with the Symbian Foundation. “QT is the only software company we know that does the cross-platform work so well,” said Rivas. “It’s hard enough to develop cross-platform software for a variety of handsets alone. But Qt does it not only on handsets, but also on tablets and PCs, whether such a device comes with a keypad or a touch screen, or with a larger size screen.”
ZDNet.co.uk talked with Symbian’s research chief, David Wood, to discuss the complications of Symbian’s switch to open source, as well as what the next few years hold for smartphone technology.
Apple sold 6.9 million iPhones in the third quarter of 2008, compared with 6.1 million BlackBerries sold over the same period. The company has sold roughly 200 million iPhone applications from its online AppStore in its three-plus months of existence. Unlike Google and Symbian, Apple and RIM are not open. But RIM is talking to applications developers in an effort to entice them to develop more third-party applications with tools to build Web applications and expand beyond the Java platform that has been used for BlackBerry application development.
