Today is the first day of the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas, so it seemed like a good time to announce that the Eclipse Foundation has joined the Symbian Foundation and the Symbian Foundation has joined the Eclipse Foundation. Eclipse and Symbian have been working together for a number of years; Symbian Ltd. was an active member of the Eclipse community. The creation of the Symbian Foundation and their decision to open source the Symbian technology created a new opportunity for the two organizations to work closely together.
An obvious area for collaboration is the fact that both organizations are not-for-profit Foundations that are stewards of their respective open source community and actively promote a commercial ecosystem around the technology. This is a new model for industry collaboration and there is much to be learned. We have and will continue to share best practices in this area with our Symbian colleagues.
The two communities also share a common license, the Eclipse Public License (EPL). We were very honoured to have Symbian choose the EPL for their license. Now we share an opportunity to promote the EPL as a great license for doing business friendly open source development.
Finally, we look forward to Symbian’s participation in the new Eclipse Pulsar initiative. Pulsar is an initiative announced in early March that will drive a common mobile tools platform. Motorola, RIM, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, IBM and Genuitec have signed on to support Pulsar and it will be nice to add Symbian. Having a universal tools platform is an important first step to making it easier for developers to create interesting and innovative mobile applications.
Please join me in welcoming the Symbian Foundation to the Eclipse community. The mobile and open source spaces are certainly exciting so it is great to have close relationships with Symbian.
