Re: [Opl-dev-development] ER5 source

[<ktk...@hi...>]

Hi David,

Thanks for your reply, I actually had seen the original
post of Phil's I think. I very much understand that this
is the decision of Psion/Symbian, but anyway I have to
counter where I think it's appropriate.

> Symbian...source had to be sanitised, checked, re-built,
> fixed, tested again...

Of course you want to remove confidential information
from the source, but apart from that, you are not
required to check/rebuild/fix/test.
It is nice if you do that, but you don't have to publish 
a fully working set of code.

> 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.  

From my point of view this has nothing to do with the
legal issue, but I should have missed something.
It's very nice of you if you kindly tell me why.

To me it seems that ALL of the problems that can potentially
arise are related to cost (i.e. development cost, support 
cost etc.), not law.

> Like it or not, v5 is nowhere near as mass-
> market as v6.x onwards (and becoming increasingly less
> so too)

That's quite understandable. And the only false logic is
that doing something for ER5 means nothing for V6 and later. 

My point was there are MANY ER5-only developers who would
be VERY useful for  longer term possibilities and future
of Symbian V6 and later if Symbian/Psion opens up the ER5
OPL source.

Now, returning to your reply, David,

> 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. 

I really hope so. But my impression was negative.
Anyway when I told them that OPL was opensourced, they
didn't look at the code. And then later when I asked if
they'd like to see ER5 code, they said yes.

From some of the replis I got, it was rather clear that
they're not interested in developing for V6/7 or later 
because there's no interesting device for them running 
V6/7 and there seems to be no plan of such interesting 
devices in the future.

And by the way that's the reason why many of these kind 
of people in Japan are converting to Linux Zaurus. At
least so it appears to me.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but as a matter
of fact it is this "I'll use gcc/java/perl/ruby/python/lua/
whatever" kind of people who are most willing to see the
code of interpreter/compiler.

Is this a loss or something else? That depends, but for
me it's a loss and a pitty.

> 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.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm worrying about, and that's why
I got really serious about asking you to open ER5 OPL source.

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

Thank you very much, I'll try to keep following your
progress!

Best regards,
Keita