“Symbian Foundation has started dismantling itself. On Dec.17 the organization will shut down its websites, and anyone who wants to get the source code for the current version of the Symbian mobile operating system should download it now or they will have to pay for a copy to be shipped on physical media in the future, its website. Nokia will take over development of Symbian OS, the company said on Nov. 8. The Symbian Foundation will become a licensing operation only.”
It’s good that I have the full PDK and source safely dumped onto a DVD. 3.7 GB of binaries and sources.
Because otherwise no one would care
Except those who would like to study the source code? You know, that’s also one of the strong benefits of open source: education.
I agree whole heartedly that is a good reason to look at source code. However,given the complex history of Symbian and the crazy procedures for compiling it, it should be understood for what it is: a Byzantine system with isolated spots of brilliance. When all you have control over is a small section of the over all code, you tend to do a great job in that section, but the overall design of the code base is a bit haphazard being decided more for business reasons than technical ones.
Here’s a script to clone the OSS repositories. The URLs are scraped from http://developer.symbian.org/oss/. You will need to have Mercurial installed.
Script URL: http://pastebin.com/dJFxH7i2