Thanks for the heads-up. I ‘ve added db4o to the table of who’s who in mobile open source.

Andreas

Best!

German

Mark

Agreed, there are no per-unit royalties, but that’s nomenclature. The substantial fees needed to fund the OPEX costs from the five OEM members should be in the order of $5M per year per OEM member shipping devices. Whether you consider this to be royalties, membership fees or maintenance costs is simply a question of how OEMs are accounting for this cost. The essence of the matter is that the Symbian Foundation will have a substantial OPEX and the OEMs need to pay for that, as no-one else will.

Now far eastern OEMs may re-use the EPL-licensed OS code internally, but I suspect that in the terms of SF membership there might be a limiting clause.. again goes back to my point that you can have open source code with a closed governance model. We won’t know for sure until the SF governance model is published.

Re: open source use at the bottom of the stack. Agreed – and it’s mentioned in the post (“the drivers for the modem stack are always closed source.”)

Re: status of Symbian employees: yes, you are right, 1st Feb is the effective date for the new employment contracts taking effect.

So, clearly a lot of the ‘openness’ of the Symbian Foundation is opaque for now. We will know for sure when the terms of the governance model are published.

Andreas

Actually I agree with Simone. Although you’re right that the biggest OEMs will share the cost of developing and maintaining the Symbian Foundation platform, there won’t be any per-unit royalties – the license is clear. OEMs will only have to pay to have some say in the governance (board seats for the big paying members). Once the whole thing is under the EPL there’s absolutely nothing to stop cheap far eastern OEMs piggy-backing the efforts of the others for free.

The other issue I’d raise is on open source at the bottom of the stack. Actually a lot of drivers are still closed source. OpenMoko – the most open platform of all – even had some binary blobs down at the very bottom for a long time because the silicon vendors wouldn’t play the open source game (which prompted them to find a new vendor). Hopefully this effect is reducing now but it was very common and troublesome and there have been a lot of debates about the legality of closed source Linux drivers.

Last tiny picky point on your comments above – Symbian employees won’t officially become Nokia employees until 1st Feb, despite the acquisition closing.

Mark

Symbian employees are now Nokia employees, but Symbian Foundation employees will be hired from multiple places, including Symbian.

OHA has a dark sides, too; source code contributions are controlled by Google, whereas the Symbian Foundation will be technically neutral in managing source code commits.

Andreas

I really do not see any reason for an OEM to pay so much and to see the OS assets publicly available to other competitors.

IMHO to mantain the headcount of ex-Symbian people wil l be completely in charge of Nokia.

There are so many big differences between OHA and SF but actually the first one seems more genuine and strategically framed into the Leader’s business model than the second.

Let’s see.
Thanks again for sharing our views.
Simone

Thanks for bringing this to my attention – I ‘m waiting for a response from OKL before updating the post.

Ciao Simone,

There are two distinct concepts that open source projects introduce: the license and the governance model. Although a lot has been written and understood about licenses, governance models are still the subject of research (for example this excellent Feb 2008 paper from West and O’ Mahony).

The governance model of the Symbian Foundation is not yet publicized. When publicized, it will detail who has commit rights to the Symbian Foundation code, how are contribution conflicts arbitrated, how much do members pay, what is the process for becoming a member etc.

It’s very important to note that a license is relatively independent of the governance model; whereas an OSI license will detail your obligations and rights for using, modifying and dstributing code, it will not say how the community dynamics around that code will work; this is determined by the governance and can vary widely from single-company controlled projects (e.g. WebKit) to fully autonomous communities.

In both theory and practice, Symbian Foundation will have a headcount to support. with circa 250 people, this works out to an OPEX of 2.5M dollars per year, which divided across each of the five OEMs with a board seat, this means 5M dollars per OEM member. Now whether you call these annual fees or you translate these into per unit fees, is simple nomenclature. In practice, SF will be maintained out of primarily the OEMs’ pockets, whereas Android will be maintained out of Google’s pockets (AFAIK); I wouldn’t say this is a defeating point for SF, but certainly one OEMs will consider.

- Andreas

“However the Symbian Foundation hasn’t publicised the fees members will have to pay for shipping handsets with the Symbian Foundation code; if the Foundation is to support is sub-500 staff (numbers according to Lee Williams), then the effective license fees should be in the region of millions of dollars per year per member.”

EPL speaks clearly and once the code will be disclosed publicly (no reason to chose an open source license like EPL if you’re not going to disclose) everyone will be able to use it.

EPL is very similar to ASL (Android) the only difference lies on the “derivative work” weak copyleft clause that’s inside EPL (and not in ASL).

And, really, having Symbian asking for per-handset fees facing a “zero royalties” Android is a sure defeat IMHO.

Hope this time the comment will be published. Last time was detectes as spam.