Symbian is the popular mobile operating system developed by Nokia and others, the exclusive rights to which Nokia recently purchased from its partners before pledging to release the OS under an open-source license.
Android is the still-unreleased open-source Linux+Java mobile operating system that Google has been assembling to form the guts of the magical, years-salivated-over GPhone.
Hang on, did you notice that both of the sentences above include the phrases "open source" and "mobile operating system"? Oh man, these guys would be CRAZY not to merge, right?
Wrong. Here's why:
1. There's nothing to gain. The overlap between Android and Symbian must be close to 100 percent. How do you merge two completely distinct operating systems? The Android+Symbian chatter is akin to arguing that Windows and OS X could plausibly be merged. The work required in ripping out parts of each system to make way for overlapping bits from the other system would take forever, and what would be the point?
2. Symbian is NOT an open-source operating system--at least not yet. Open sourcing an operating system takes a long time. Sun announced plans to open source Solaris in 2004. It took a year for Sun to release some of its code under the OpenSolaris banner, and it wasn't until this year that Sun released the first truly ready-to-use incarnation of OpenSolaris. And even the 2008 incarnation of OpenSolaris isn't billed as production-ready.
Android is already late. There's no way that Google is going to hold up Android for four months, let alone four years, to wait for Nokia to dot and cross its IP i's and t's, and do so for nothing.
Now, just because there's a million to one chance that Symbian and Android might merge doesn't mean that Nokia and Google can't collaborate on the mobile OS front. Both Symbian and Android could greatly benefit from a measure of application platform standardization--different systems that run the same apps, perhaps with Java as a common language between the two systems.
Am I wrong? Does a Symbian/Android merger have a Lloyd Christmas' chance in Aspen of occurring?
A couple of days ago, my colleague Andrew Garcia forwarded me what seems like the 20th plea I've seen over the past couple of years to call or write my representatives in Congress to Save Net Radio. This latest plea came from Pandora.com, a fantastic Internet-based radio station that holds more claim on my online hours than any single Web purveyor this side of Google.
I find it too audacious to hope that Congress will get around to right-sizing our country's runaway IP regulation regime any time soon, so if the businesses that run Internet radio stations and the listeners who frequent them want to see this form of enjoying music continue, they should begin marshaling their (in Pandora's case, considerable) resources toward solving the problem themselves.
Fortunately, there's precedent that given the presence of friendlier options, restrictive licensing schemes can be made to bend through market pressure ...
The idea that companies and individuals might risk lawsuits for running applications that infringe on copyrights or patents gained popularity when SCO began threatening to run down Linux end users in retaliation for secret (SCO refused to detail them) upstream IP violations.
The story was (and still is) that since open source licenses explicitly declaim liability for SCO-style attacks, and since most open source software projects don't have the resources to pay on lawsuit judgments anyhow, open source software is riskier for companies than proprietary software would be.
Unless, of course, your open source software provider was an IT titan with a big sack of patents (and lawyers) slung over its back.
Is open source software indemnification a necessary defense for a real threat, or isn't it?
Today Microsoft laid out a major new interoperability initiative that's meant to "increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors."
During the press conference that Microsoft executives Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia and Brad Smith held this morning, much was made about the pains Microsoft is taking to include the open-source software community in the new interop initiative.
However, the legal environment surrounding interoperability between Microsoft's products and the open-source applications that have sprung up to rival Redmond's proprietary wares is scarcely less murky today than it was yesterday.
Wireless handset and infrastructure giant Nokia has announced plans to acquire Trolltech, a purveyor of application frameworks for desktops and mobile devices.
Armed with its new Trolltech assets, Nokia might find itself in the perfect position to deliver us the sort of next-generation computing devices we need to bid adieu to today's bloated client paradigm.
Today, Sun Microsystems turned heads by announcing plans to lay down seven and a half percent of its current market capitalization to acquire open-source database vendor MySQL AB.
Why did Sun do it? Look no further than the other major acquisition announced today, in which Oracle declared victory in its months-old bid to purchase middleware giant BEA Systems.
Last week I wrote about how the lack of a Linux and open source answer to Microsoft's Active Directory is slowing the spread of desktop Linux.
Could the Linux and open source answer to Active Directory be Active Directory?
Today, Likewise Software (the firm formerly known as Centeris) launched a new open source software project that consists of the authentication services core of the firm's Linux-to-Active Directory product, Likewise Enterprise.
The project, called Likewise Open, is licensed under the GPL and is set for inclusion in the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and Ubuntu 8.04, with to-be-determined bundling with Novell's SUSE Linux on the way.
For Likewise Software, the idea is that once organizations get a taste for managing authentication for their Linux desktops via Active Directory, they'll want to trade up for the non-free, Enterprise version of the company's product, which adds support for additional management goodies such as Group Policy.
I think that Likewise Open is a very promising development for Linux in general, and large managed desktop Linux deployments in particular.
Of course, many Linux-embracing organizations will be reticent about building their infrastructures around Microsoft technology, but with a wholly open source alternative on the horizon in the form of Samba 4, AD may end up being the great directory hope of Linux and open source, after all.
Earlier this year, while writing about the fortunes of Linux on the enterprise desktop, I came across the paper, "World Domination as an Optimization Hack," in which the GNOME Foundation's Federico Mena-Quintero identifies bulk Linux deployments as the lowest hanging fruit for Linux moving forward.
Although Mena-Quintero doesn't call it out explicitly, the common thread that runs through administrator feedback he presents in the paper is the absence of directory services and the management functions, such as Group Policy, that these services make possible.
I finally got around to columnizing about open source's directory services leadership vacuum:
Opinion: Until Red Hat, Novell, or another party focuses around open-source directory services, Linux will be stuck playing catch-up with Windows 2000.
Review: The latest versions of fast-moving OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora make a strong case for Linux on the desktop, but there's lots of integration work to be done.
Slide Show: OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora are three of the most popular and innovative Linux distributions available. But do their latest versions--OpenSUSE 10.3, Ubuntu 7.10 and Fedora 8--and the enterprise Linux distributions they foreshadow deserve a spot on your organization's desktop and notebook clients? eWEEK Labs checks out the three new distros.
Last week I came across a video presentation of Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan's "Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing," a method for resizing images by slicing out or padding uninteresting strips of pixels.
If you've seen this video already, you may be a bit bummed-out that you can't access an application right now that'll work this magic. However, at least one enterprising developer has already implemented this and released his initial code, and I can report that his app works pretty well...
