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Choosing the licence

One of the most important issues for the fledgling Symbian Foundation has been choosing a licence. One thing they knew from the start: there are too many licences out there, and Symbian needed to be under a recognised licence. That's why all code will be licensed using the Eclipse Public License. It's a license that's been proven to work, and one that companies have built successful business models around. The Symbian Foundation needs to be a community that's business oriented, and choosing the EPL helps here, as it shows there isn't a conflict between business and open source, with companies like Adobe and Aptana already building commercial products around EPL code.

When starting to design the Symbian Foundation, Forsyth looked closely looked at the model of the Eclipse community – both architecturally and ideologically. It seemed to be just what was needed, and he noted, "As soon as we announced the licence we began to work with the Eclipse guys, who have been very supportive, helping us set up the infrastructure, and build the code evaluation models". There's a big similarity between Eclipse and Symbian, both involve moving from a proprietary model, with one company as a contributor, to an open body with a diverse ecosystem of contributors. Forsyth is pleased with the help, "We're able to build on their lessons".

The main lessons are simple. First and foremost, an open source body needs to have metrics used to evaluate the quality of the code, and the importance of the contributions. That's all part of making the Symbian Foundation really independent from Nokia, as the Eclipse team discovered when it began to separate itself from IBM. The result should be a merit driven community, where what a contributor does for the project is a measure of their influence, not the name on the badge. As Forsyth says, "Independence is central to the Foundation's prosperity, and it's important that we don't pretend to be anything we're not."

The Other Licence

There's a lot of work going into getting the code ready for the wider community, with a lot of effort needed to put the codebase out. Forsyth says that the Foundation will be "Doing it progressively, and only some of the code will come under the EPL from the word go." The aim is to get the whole platform under the EPL in 2010, so there needs to be an interim licence to kick things off, and to get people contributing. That's where the Symbian Foundation Licence comes in. In spirit it's very like the EPL, but in practice there's one big difference: the SFL is limited only to Symbian Foundation members.

Forsyth is careful to point out that there's a very good reason for the restrictions in the temporary SFL. All the members of the Symbian Foundation have a patent agreement, which he describes as "basically agreeing that they are not patent trolls". The SFL is a safe harbour that lets them contribute code to the Foundation, while the rest of the codebase is sanitised and placed under the EPL. There won't be an automatic transition between SFL licensed code to the EPL, and the Foundation is still working out how to handle the transition. Forsyth points out that "Mechanisms need to be in place which are more than clauses, and any transition between licenses needs to be smooth and not leave any gaps."

There's one piece of history that the Symbian Foundation is keen to use to its advantage. The Symbian source has always been available to partners, so it's clean, easy to understand, and well documented. That should help with making code assumptions public, with well defined coding standards and guidelines already in place. Forsyth believes that should help with the project, as "In the past we were working with an open model, bringing OEM features into the platform. Governance will remain key, with common development guidelines being put on the table at the very start of things. Even so Forsyth is aware that the Foundation will need to avoid over legislation, and will have to be flexible.

As Forsyth says, when thinking about how the Foundation will develop in the future, "We don't expect to get it all right at the beginning - the important thing is to correct any mistakes we make. The code base and the community are living things and we need to respond to that." He goes on to point out one of the signs of a healthy community is debate about how it works, with key guidelines being regularly updated.

So what's the real lesson from the open source community for the Symbian Foundation? For Forsyth it's simple, as he says, "The thing is to get it right in the long run and learn from your mistakes."

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