Free, free, free, the Symbian Kernel

Okay, I told a tiny little lie in my first post, but something very important popped into my head in the past few minutes. This was the frankly astonishing quiet surrounding what is only one of the most significant announcements in technology this year. This announcement is that the source code for the Symbian kernel has been released under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL). Not only that, but this has happened well ahead of schedule. In addition, as well as the source code a number of important supporting bits and pieces have been released. These include a PC based simulator which runs ARM compiled code and a ‘baseport’ for the low-low cost hardware platform called Beagleboard (circe $150). Together these bits and pieces make it possible for anyone to make modifications to the kernel and see the results. The hope is that this will help people get into the habit of working with the Symbian platform and foster a nice, friendly community.

Unfortunately, the sentence ‘Symbian Kernel EPLed’ only contained one word that ‘professional’ tech bloggers and analysts could understand so they either had to report it as is or not at all, being unable to process it’s significance. While this fact is slightly depressing, it’s not really worrying as the select group of people who have something valuable to contribute to this effort will surely have been on the lookout for this news (and besides there’s something called Twitter).

Now that I’ve got that bee out of my bonnet, maybe I can slap something together about the experience I’ve been having with learning Qt…

Hello world!

Ah, in the finest programming tradition! Handy that because this blog is mainly going to be about software, programming, mobile and other technical sorts of things.

Anyway, let me introduce myself. My name is Brendan Donegan and in my work life I’m a Test Engineer at the not-for-profit Symbian Foundation, which looks after the worlds most widely used smartphone operating system. Before that I worked in test at the company formerly known as Symbian Software Limited.

While I may make comment on work related things here (I’ll see how it develops) I’ll probably mainly use it to muse about my ‘work related’ hobbies. That is, hobby programming, following technology news and debating the relative merits of the different smartphone platforms (you can guess where my loyalties lie!)

The first post will appear shortly and is going to be about Qt, which is part of Nokia’s master plan for winning back developers from the big bad Apple.