Towards An Open Development Culture V1.0

Towards an Open Development CultureLars Kurth, Contributor Community
This talk is about sharing what we have learned in the last 8 months!

A short history
Initial codecontribution
250 million phones shipped
250 different phone models
2009
100 million
phones shipped
2008
Nokia acquires Symbian Ltd
2006
Symbian Ltd was
founded
1998
Copyright © 2009 Symbian Foundation. Public

We are …

An independent nonprofit open source organization
Membership based
Board of directors staffed by funding members

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Members 2009

Preparation work:
Preparation work:Seeding the creation of the Foundation

Copyright © 2009 Symbian Foundation.
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Planning the Foundation
Oversight by founding members
Expert teams
Staffed by Nokia and Symbian Ltd to look at specific problems
More than 100 people were involved

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Looking to solve problems such as ...
What Infrastructure
is needed?
Bug tracker, Mailing Lists,
SCM system, etc.
How do different parts ~of the community work together?
Collaboration Process
What are the different open source roles?
Package Owners, Committers, etc.
How is the platform governed?
Feature & Roadmap, Architecture, UI and Release councils
How will the code base be structured?
System model and technology domains
How are roadmaps created?
AND MANY MORE …

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BUT:
of course there were some issues !
Gaps, unintended consequences, somethings did not fit
Helped give Symbian a GOOD START

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Preparing the Code3rd party IP and the initial contribution
Preparing the Code
3rd party IP and the initial contribution
After 10 years the codebase contained a big portion of 3rd party IP
Which could not be open sourced
40 Million Lines of C++

The IP Challenge
40 million lines of code had to be checked for IP violations
Many false positives
Many benign cases (e.g. code copied from a book)
It took 6 months to identify all serious IP issues
16% of components had an instance of an IP issue
94 cases altogether
Affected code needed to be removed initially
Ultimately replace by open source friendly code

Handling IP Holes
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Removing code left “dirty holes” – aka components that did not build.
Contribution, R&D License or non-core items(leave the hole)
Refactor code such that components build – “clean holes”
Fill the holes …(on average 10 per month)

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Challenge:
negotiating IP issues

The cultural challenge:
The cultural challenge:changing an eco-system

Eco-system: what to do?
Raising questions such as …

Will Symbian still be around in a year?
What is the opportunity?
What is the risk?
How does the game change?
How do I adapt?
Do I need to change my business model?

This takes time
Many eco-system companies
are concluding this process
Early birds are thriving
A shock for the eco-system
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Community Leadership: in its Infancy
Solution: education, supporting, mentor and rewarding desired behavior!
Solution: foundation staff leading and act as role models
How do I find 130 open source leaders who know their technology?
Personal “change” challenges

Why would anybody want to contribute?
What do I need to do to be successful?
What support can I count on
What am I allowed / not allowed to do?

I Can’t! Experts need to grow into open leaders over time!

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Starting the Contributor Community
We had to learn what motivates contributions
Transfer the knowledge to the community
Transfer the knowledge to our open source leaders
All contributions satisfy a SELFISH NEED!
Show me the NEED
Show me the MONEY

Contributions: Thank You !!!
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Major contributionsin the making

3 from Japan
5 from Nokia
7 otherwise
More discussed at SEE

Initial contributions:
Smaller contributions just happen! Hard to track
Other contributions so far …
Contributions being worked on …

Lessons learnt!
Lessons learnt!
So far …

How are OSS projects normally created?
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Idea
Proprietary
Mi
Project
Incubator

Process takes between 2-24 months
Project adds 2-3 committers
Process requires a large amount of support
Apache average: 14 months

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How can you do this as FAST as possible when you have a HUGE initial contribution?

Lesson: A STRONG FOUNDATION
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A strong team of community managers and
technology managers
An open source organization with some technical capability
And prove to community that the model works
And show opportunities
Can find and work withvendors who may want tocontribute
Can initiate projects
Because of results the community takesinitiative

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Building and releasing the platform and development kits.
Solution: the open source Foundation delivers critical common goods
Many open source projects struggle with common goods
A variant of the Tragedy of the Commons
Testing for compatibility
Lesson: Common Goods

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Members Companies
Using and contributing
SFL Package
EPL Package
Everybody
Using and contributing
A beta period towards going open source :
learn, fix & de-risk
Two stages to true Open Source

Moving to the EPL
So far: learning how to EPL, such that ourcommunity can movefaster
Build
16 out of 134
Kernel:
Kernel,beagleboard, qemu
Security
IDE, hostenv, etc.
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Lesson: Two stage process
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The Good:

Time to staff the foundation
Time for community leaders to learn
Time to resolve challenges
Time to build momentum

The Bad:

Negative publicity
Negative sentiment from parts of the OSS community

Lesson: LEAVE CHALLENGES
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When the foundation started, significant parts of how it was to operate were still to defineCouncil members had some CHALLENGES to resolve
builds sense of
OWNERSHIP
Actually this wasa blessing!
Problems (which people care about)
Big stake in solving these
+
=

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Lesson: COMMUNITY REPRESENTATION
COUNCILS are becoming mechanisms
for
COMMUNITY REPRESENTATION
Councils:

F&R
Architecture
UI
Release

Lesson: LET EVERYBODY INFLUENCE
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SIGs: Special Interest Groups
Sense of
OWNERSHIP
Symbian Idea Sitehttp://ideas.symbian.org/:
400 ideas added in a week
Working groups (e.g. UI migration working group)
BoFs and other interactive parts of our annual conference!
UI Brainstorm

Lesson: OPENESS
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Open Management
Our community like the fact that roadmaps, backlogs, minutes, etc. are publicly available!
Worry to share information that can be used to deduce trade secrets
Culture Change & Cultural Collision
Many are experimenting with IDEAS – being open can lead to embarrassment
Be as open as you can
BUT
do not force your community to be!

Lesson: INCENTIVE STRUCTURE

Can I see roadmaps, influence the direction of APIs and the platform?
Influence = make the platform work for me
Can I influence the direction of the community?
Influence = protect investment

Vendor
Community
Neutrality
Closed
Open
Development
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Still lots to do and learn!
So far being part of this journey has been FUN, but also lots of HARD WORK!
We have a very goodchance of succeeding

S^1 & S^2 devices in 2009
SH-04A
X6
N97 Mini
F-03A
F-01A
F-08A
N97
SH-06A
SH-05A
SH-06A Nerv
5230
5800 Express Music
5530 Express Music
5800Navi
Satio
SH-07A
SH-03A
SH-02A
SH-01A
F-02A
F-09A
F-04A
i8910

Some data to close...
>60% of these will be based on open source operating systems
Symbian is projected to be the most used OS in 2012 & 2014
In 2012 - 2014 there will be 372 - 525 million smart phones.
Open Source in Mobile is here to stay !!!