opl-dev-development

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
vox: +44 20 7563 2235
mobile: +44 7973 204 214

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - Lewis Carroll



**********************************************************************
Symbian Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales with registered number 01796587 and registered office at 19 Harcourt Street, London, W1H 4HF, UK.
This message is intended only for use by the named addressee and may contain privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, copy or take any action in reliance on it. If you have received this message in error please notify pos...@sy... and delete the message and any attachments accompanying it immediately. Symbian does not accept liability for any corruption, interception, amendment, tampering or viruses occurring to this message in transit or for any message sent by its employees which is not in compliance with Symbian corporate policy.
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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

Re: [Opl-dev-development] ER5 source

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

Keita,

Yes, we would need to check/rebuild/fix/test. We are not willing to contribute code which 
doesn't work. This is not the approach we took for OPL for Symbian OS v6.x, and we 
would not be happy taking it for an earlier version either. As such we would face the 
large task of removing confidential information, testing, fixing and re-building what is 
now a very old and out-of-date codeline. The legal side would also need to be looked 
into, both from the point-of-view that OPL is in the ROM on the Psion devices, and from 
a backward compatibility point-of-view in case it broke an OPL app Psion users are 
relying onto.

br -d


-- 
David Mery
Technology Outreach, Symbian Ltd
dav...@sy...
http://www.symbian.com
vox: +44 20 7563 2235
mobile: +44 7973 204 214

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - Lewis Carroll



**********************************************************************
Symbian Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales with registered number 01796587 and registered office at 19 Harcourt Street, London, W1H 4HF, UK.
This message is intended only for use by the named addressee and may contain privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, copy or take any action in reliance on it. If you have received this message in error please notify pos...@sy... and delete the message and any attachments accompanying it immediately. Symbian does not accept liability for any corruption, interception, amendment, tampering or viruses occurring to this message in transit or for any message sent by its employees which is not in compliance with Symbian corporate policy.
**********************************************************************

Re: [Opl-dev-development] ER5 source

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

Hi David,

Thank you very much for your reply.

> Yes, we would need to check/rebuild/fix/test.

OK you would want to do that, and I don't have any 
reason to argue against that. 
I'm only grateful to you Symbian to release the OPL
code for ER6, which should have costed you considerable
time, money and human resources. You've made a brave
and tough decision which I think is REALLY benefitical
to users and developers alike.

Probably the only reasonable approach that would attract
more ER5 guys to the codebase of OPL is  to backport 
everything to ER5.

And I guess it is most desirable for Symbian if  this
backporting is done as an independent user-side project
to minimize the support issue (i.e. the product should 
never, under any circumstances, be confused as the 
"official" product from Symbian).

I'm not too sure if I'll have time in the near future,
but if I will I'd like to start.
If that ever happens (let's be wishful), can I expect 
any support from you, or do you think it's plainly a
bad idea?

Best wishes,
Keita

Re: [Opl-dev-development] ER5 source

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

Keita,

It is an open source project, so if you and others are keen to backport the code to 
Symbian OS v5 feel free to do it. I am not convinced that's the most efficient use of 
resources and hence think it is not a very good idea, but you don't need my blessing! 
As for support, it should come from all involved in opl-dev. My role in making opl-dev 
happen was mainly in building a case for it to get Symbian's management to approve it 
and convincing our legal department to adopt LGPL for this project (and dealing with 
part of the infrastructure such as setting up the SourceForge project), ie I haven't 
contributed any code to the project so couldn't support you on development issues.

br -d

On 4 Aug 2003 at 21:24, ktk...@hi... wrote:

> Hi David,
> 
> Thank you very much for your reply.
> 
> > Yes, we would need to check/rebuild/fix/test.
> 
> OK you would want to do that, and I don't have any 
> reason to argue against that. 
> I'm only grateful to you Symbian to release the OPL
> code for ER6, which should have costed you considerable
> time, money and human resources. You've made a brave
> and tough decision which I think is REALLY benefitical
> to users and developers alike.
> 
> Probably the only reasonable approach that would attract
> more ER5 guys to the codebase of OPL is  to backport 
> everything to ER5.
> 
> And I guess it is most desirable for Symbian if  this
> backporting is done as an independent user-side project
> to minimize the support issue (i.e. the product should 
> never, under any circumstances, be confused as the 
> "official" product from Symbian).
> 
> I'm not too sure if I'll have time in the near future,
> but if I will I'd like to start.
> If that ever happens (let's be wishful), can I expect 
> any support from you, or do you think it's plainly a
> bad idea?
> 
> Best wishes,
> Keita


-- 
David Mery
Technology Outreach, Symbian Ltd
dav...@sy...
http://www.symbian.com
vox: +44 20 7563 2235
mobile: +44 7973 204 214

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - Lewis Carroll



**********************************************************************
Symbian Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales with registered number 01796587 and registered office at 19 Harcourt Street, London, W1H 4HF, UK.
This message is intended only for use by the named addressee and may contain privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, copy or take any action in reliance on it. If you have received this message in error please notify pos...@sy... and delete the message and any attachments accompanying it immediately. Symbian does not accept liability for any corruption, interception, amendment, tampering or viruses occurring to this message in transit or for any message sent by its employees which is not in compliance with Symbian corporate policy.
**********************************************************************