Robert Pogson

2010-2-4 In a press release, Symbian announced that their code, used on most smartphones will be open. Distributed under the Eclipse Licence and others, the code will be available to all for any purpose promoting the use of the software in diverse ways on these gadgets or anything else. See that M$? The world is becoming open as you go further back into your cave to die.

According to FSF,  the Eclipse Licence makes this free software but  incompatible with the GPL. Still, this is a good, competitive move to promote competition rather than to kill competition as M$ always tries. One thing is sure. This move will make the smartphone software environment much more interesting, vibrant and full of choice. M$ will not be able to grow in this space on the basis of its meagre product in comparison. Expect Symbian now to be able to move into the netbook segment, further weakening M$’s hold on that space. Manufacturers will have customers who like Symbian on cell phones who want it on netbooks and perhaps by the end of the year, every other kind of PC. Who knows? Openness leads to an exciting future, not a cattle chute.

2010 will be the year of ARM and it is still young. ARM is excited by all the prospects. This move could make the exaggerated claims of ARM real very soon. While M$ is stuck on its treadmill, the world is racing ahead on flying feet. The design of Symbian is based on sound principles rather than marketing like that other OS. Symbian will be able to compete with GNU/Linux well. Both will kill that other OS in the portable field. The world does not need to pay repeatedly for M$ bloat and inefficiency. It has many better choices.

I received a bit of spam today. It contained a blurb from Dell,

“Dell has embarked on upgrading its 100,000 clients to Windows 7. 85% are upgrading from XP. Learn their experiences and the improvement they have seen in better data and network protection, reduced help desk calls and the ability to image a system on the fly in half the time it took on XP. “

I went on to read a two-page summary of the reasoning and results expected and I was amused. They had only made a trial of Vista and realized it was not for them. Then when “7″ came along, they took the bait, hook, line and sinker.

What were they thinking? That “7″ would solve the problems of XP and Vista, both products of M$? What of the next layer of problems? and the next after that? They wanted increased manageability, performance and reduced costs so they rushed out and sent M$ $10 million or more to reduce costs. How sad. They could have had all the benefits and kept their money by switching to GNU/Linux. Did they even think of it? Instead of innovating and setting an example for the benefit of customers, they conspire with M$ to exploit the addictions of the customers. Sick.

They could have switched to thin clients from GNU/Linux terminal servers for the ultimate in manageability, security and low cost. The few whose workload was not amenable to thin client technology could run GNU/Linux on thick clients or servers, if they needed more power. The speed of reconfiguration that they boasted would now be as little as hours could be minutes with thin clients.

Dell has shown some independence from M$ in the past but here they are suckling again. Wasn’t Vista enough? Wasn’t the malware and re-re-rebooting enough? What will it take to wake Dell up to the reality that M$ is not their friend?