Re: [Opl-dev-development] ER5 source

[David M. <dav...@sy...>]

Keita,

I remember your original question. At the time I explained it was highly unlikely. The 
current plan is not to open source versions prior to v6.0. See below a good explanation 
posted by my colleague Phil Spencer in another forum. 

=
At the moment, we have no plans to open source anything before v6.0 OPL. The 
reason for this is simple (if, unfortunately, not what you want to hear...) - resources. To 
publish the v6.0 source code required a very big effort from several people inside 
Symbian...source had to be sanitised, checked, re-built, fixed, tested again...and that's 
before other legal-related issues. The legal situation on v5 is also more complex as 
OPL was included directly in product ROMs. This never ended up happening for v6.0 
which made open sourcing easier.  

We took the decision to invest the required effort in open sourcing v6.0 OPL because of 
its longer term possibilities and future. Like it or not, v5 is nowhere near as mass-
market as v6.x onwards (and becoming increasingly less so too) so there would be less 
benefit in us dedicating time and resources to open sourcing v5 OPL too.  
=

I hope that some of the contributors to the Psion-ML-J mailing list that showed interest 
in OPL for Symbian OS v5 might be interested to contribute to opl-dev anyway. 

So far opl-dev has generated lost of interest from OPL developers, but not (yet) as 
much interest from C++ developers wanting to contribute to the project. Rick is still 
doing all/most of the work on the v6.0 and v6.1 port. As has been mentioned, another 
developer has been involved in a UIQ port (Symbian OS v7.0) and is close to posting 
sources for an alpha version.

Good luck with your new job. I hope you'll soon have more spare time!

br -d

On 30 Jul 2003 at 19:35, ktk...@hi... wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> sorry for keeping quiet for a while, I'm in a process of 
> changing job and cannot spare much time for OPL development.
> 
> It seems that, so far, not too many people are reviewing
> OPL codebase (OK they might be quietly reviewing it), and
> my question is relevant to this point.
> 
> Do you remember (especially David?) that I asked about
> opening the codebase for ER5 OPL? At that time it was
> mere an wishful thinking of me, but this time I'd like
> to seriously ask you the possibility of that.
> 
> The following is just to give you my view on this topic:
> 
> Probably some of the inside people in Psion and/or
> Symbian would augue that there's absolutely no point
> in doing anything on ER5, but if that's the case they're
> very much mislead, probably because they don't know how 
> opensource works.
> Actually the point in opening the ER5 OPL is to boost
> the number of people who look at the common OPL codebase.
> As a large part of the ER5 OPL code should be identical to
> that of newer Symbian opensource code (i.e. 92XX and Series60),
> it is very likely that Symbian OPL would be benefitted
> whenever ANY improvement is added to ER5 OPL.
> 
> If you're developing a cross-platform product like OPL,
> you can attract more developers if you open the code for
> more platforms, and one contribution from a developer who
> is only interested in one platform would benefit the whole 
> range of products.
> 
> Just to give you some example, I made the following questionair
> in Psion-ML-J, the largest Psion-related mailing list in
> Japan with 831 subscribers:
> Are you going to review the OPL code when ER5 OPL is ever going
> to be opensourced?
> 
> And I've got a positive response from 7 people (not including
> me myself). They all said that they have never looked into
> Symbian OPL code, but if ER5 OPL is opened they're quite sure
> they'll look into that. Adding me, it's almost 1% of the user
> base, which is actually a large number.
> 
> Please think of this. They might not be that interested in
> improving Symbian OPL, but they're willing to help to improve
> ER5 OPL, which will immediately turn into the improvement in 
> Symbian code. Now we have only one Japanese contributor (me),
> but we're going to have 7 more.
> There're many skilled C++/OPL developers for ER5 who could
> potentially help this project. 
> And it is much more so in Europe than in Japan where Psion
> products have always been minority. 
> Are there any good reason to decide against using this huge
> human resources?
> 
> OK, enough of my personal opinion at the moment.
> Best regards,
> Keita
> 
> 
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-- 
David Mery
Technology Outreach, Symbian Ltd
dav...@sy...
http://www.symbian.com
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