Wednesday was the kickoff meeting for all new council members of the Symbian Foundation. Some 50 people from 10+ companies, all wired up to make the foundation happen, gathered together to discuss the opportunities and challenges, and planning the way ahead for the foundation to become a movement creating and nurturing software that is becoming the most used software on planet. Not bad. 

The feeling in the room, and over dinner, was quite energetic. It felt like we were creating something truly unique. Lee Williams put it nicely when he said that in a few years time, we will remember these early days as “the moment in the sun”. That’s how it feels, surrounded by the bright yellow hearts, images of Mr. Switch and friends, doodle pads now full of innovative and funny drawings from the day.



An interesting piece of news is where the membership applications are coming from. Now, the foundation has more than 100 new membership applications. 14 are from the US, 13 from China, 12 from Japan, 11 from UK 11 from Finland, and so on. Altogether companies and organisations from 26 countries are now going through the membership process. You may wonder why I’m so excited about the countries, but it’s to do with forming the ecosystem. If this is to become the most used software on planet, it needs support and enthusiasm from many language areas, different cultures and diverse business areas. The 26 countries is a really good start. 

These companies are also not all from the mobile industry, but from PC, consumer electronic and even entertainment industry. I spent some time with a nice gentleman from MySpace, it was quite exciting to hear how the social network companies see the mobile space as the next important area where things happen. We are all waiting for the integrated MySpace service on Nokia N97, shipping over the summer. 

Some other numbers that may interest you have to do with the code:

40 million lines of code (20 million in the device code and 20 million in tools, testing, etc)
450,000 source code files
45,000 directories
2000 software components
100+ packages
3 layers of 14 technology domains
1 unified platform

So, if anyone is wondering why all of the code is not open sourced immediately, it is understandable that it will take time to comb through this code and to ensure there are no security or Intellectual Property related issues that would not belong to an open source release. 

Another issue that came up in the discussions was nicely formulated as “Fragmentation is easy, Integration is hard”. As the open source code will be available to anyone, this also means that anyone can start developing their own versions of it and thus result in fragmentation of the code base. This is a weakness within the strength of open source. The four councils – Architecture, User Interface, Roadmapping and Release council - are now being designed to manage and coordinate the platform, creating mitigations for this problem. 

Something that I look forward to seeing coming to live, are the two innovation and research related web collaboration spaces research.symbian.org and ideas.symbian.org. I shall cover those as soon as they are live. 

During the day I also got a chance to hold Sony-Ericsson’s Idou phone. That’s a robust feeling, nicely designed device running on the Symbian ^1 software, a.k.a S60 5.0.