When GNOME 2.0 was born, it left a lot of GNOME users out in the cold because it jettisoned the very features we loved. Eight years later, your editor takes another look at GNOME in the form of the Karmic Koala.
When GNOME 2.0 was born, it left a lot of GNOME users out in the cold because it jettisoned the very features we loved. Eight years later, your editor takes another look at GNOME in the form of the Karmic Koala.
It’s not every day that a major operating system gets opened up, never mind one that leads the global market in its category. So, when the news came out last week that that’s just what the Symbian Foundation had done — and four months ahead of schedule, no less! — it was hard not to get excited. Android is no longer the only big kid on the open source mobile block, it seems, and the scales are now tipped considerably more in FOSS’ direction.
Three years ago Red Hat launched an effort to sell partners open source solutions — it didn’t work out as well as they had originally planned, proof that an open source app store doesn’t actually work.
When the Symbian Foundation announced the opening up of its namesake smartphone platform on Thursday, it caused a major shift not just in the mobile landscape but also in the FOSS world. Announced by Nokia back in 2008, the transition of the leading platform from proprietary code to open source was completed four months ahead of schedule and is the largest in software history, the foundation said. “The development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry,” said Lee Williams, the Symbian Foundation’s executive director.
