The announcement about Symbian going open source made me watch an introduction video flagged by my colleague Rowan, who has written about open source in mobile devices.
What I heard, among others, was that developers are encouraged to contribute to the open source platform, and in the final section (3’45″) that Symbian’s governance model allows virtually anyone to be part of the working groups and councils and have a say about their future direction. This looks good, I thought, let’s check further.
There is a wealth of information on Symbian’s developer site, including another video suggesting how users and developers can get involved.
The contribution process includes both general issues about contributing source code and more specific ones, such as how to contribute a fix, an enhancement, an extension, or how to start a new Symbian-related project.
In a nice piece on the wiki I also found things very much in the spirit of how we talk about open development and the process of building open source communities:
“Contributors are also users (which is one reason why they are motivated to meet the needs of the users) but contributors want a say in the roadmap so that they have a chance of influencing it in directions that benefit them and they want to be able to get their contributions accepted into the project. Contributors may provide code for bugfixes and new features (the most obvious form of contribution) but they can also contribute support services, translations, documentation etc.”
Community-wise this looks like a nice step to open source for Symbian. Let’s wait and see.
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