03 July 2008

An interview with Nokia's Mary McDowell,
chief development officer

RCR Wireless News had just published an interview with Mary McDowell, Nokia's Development Chief about Symbian Fundation and open-source version of Symbian OS.

Mary T. McDowell is Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer leading the newly established Corporate Development Office. In this role, Mary is responsible for optimizing Nokia’s strategic capabilities and growth potential.

She oversees Corporate Business Development, Corporate Strategy, Mobile Software Sales and Marketing, Nokia IT, Office of the Chief Technology Officer, Operational Excellence and Quality, and Solutions Portfolio Management. She is also a member of the Nokia Group Executive Board, a position held since 2004.

Won’t it take time to develop an open-source version of Symbian, giving competing open-source groups time to get their products out?

One of the factors that sets our initiative apart is the promise of backward compatibility with Symbian Version 9 and S60 3rd Edition. That means developers can release something today and it’ll be compatible with the consolidated release of the Symbian Foundation.

Because of the compatibility promise, because we’re starting with an asset that’s been in the market for a decade, that gives us a 10-year time-to-market advantage. Also, from a Nokia standpoint, this is the basis for our high-end portfolio. So our commitment to making this successful, for us and our partners, is incredibly high.

What sort of work is necessary to make Symbian “open source”? It’s not just a function of revealing the code, right?

The work is mostly crawling through the code to identify third-party components in Symbian and S60 and ensure that our suppliers don’t get ‘open-sourced’ if that was not their intention. So we have to go through the platform module by module to make sure the code is ‘clean’ before we transition it to open source.