Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

My first piece for The H, an interview with John Forsyth of the Symbian Foundation. We talked about how you can take 40 million lines of code and make them open source, how you choose a licence, and how you learn from the open source community:

How do you take a project with 40 million lines of code that's shipping on millions of devices around the world and make it open source? That's the Everest of a problem facing the Symbian Foundation as they start to deliver on the promises made when Nokia brought Symbian under its wing.

The sun was burning through the freshly-painted walls of a misnamed "hospitality suite" at the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona when we sat down with the Foundation's John Forsyth, the former VP of Strategy at Symbian and member of the Symbian Foundation Leadership Team. The big question was: just how do you plan to do it?

There's been a lot of work needed to get the Symbian Foundation to where it is today, as Forsyth pointed out, it's been a matter of "Getting people on board, the transition into operating mode, putting together the business plan, budget, the objectives and vision." You need something in place before you start to open source an operating system, and what Forsyth calls "the sprint to Day One" has been about getting the infrastructure in place, so that there's a repository for the code.

Read more.

I had a very interesting conversation yesterday with Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer. You can read some of it here at IT Pro .

Sun's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps has announced the next stage of the open sourcing of Java in London this week, adding Java ME to the road map. Open source versions of both Java ME and Java SE should be available by the end of the year.

While there were no actual dates confirmed, Phipps went into more detail on the open source roadmap for Sun's various software platforms. Describing it as a gradual process, he detailed Sun's commitment to providing an open source software stack, from OS to Java, and in the future, its middleware.

We also talked about the missing element in many Open Source projects: governance.

While one of the keys to Open Source is the license, another is just how the project is run. And Simon sees one big problem facing many open source projects.

It's all very well being open source, but with only one person with commit rights (the ability to make changes to the code) to the code base, if the project becomes successful, they're going to become overwhelmed very quickly. Things get worse when commit rights are concentrated in a single project. A project run that like that (and there are many many of them, including some very high profile ones indeed) is more like Microsoft's shared source programme than anything else. There have even been cases when experts on a piece of code have left the company that sponsors the project, and have immediately lost any rights to working with the codebase...

The really successful projects, like Linux and Apache, have distributed commit rights, and a range of people from many different organisations adding code. That's what Phipps wants to do with Sun's open source projects. Open Solaris is certainly successful, and has spawned several different distributions (including one that mixes Debian with a Solaris kernel), and he hopes to the same with Java.
Cross Posted to A New IT World

The BBC is releasing some of its internal development projects as open source. The first batch of projects includes video codecs and 3D interactive environments alongside more specialised broadcasting specific tools.

Yet more signs of the public service elements of the BBC's charter in action.

Good for them. And for us...