The site includes a full developer offering which includes platform release information, council charters, wikis, forums as well as access to the SDK, SCM (Mercurial), Bugzilla, tools, documents and FAQs.
The foundation continues to receive encouraging support from partners across the industry. Since the membership programme first opened in Februray, 81 companies have applied for membership and are either going through the formal process or have become members, 50 of which are first time endorsers.
Members will be entitled to the following, royalty free: to license, modify and distribute source code; to gain access to council meeting plans and deliverables; to participate in working groups and annual member meetings; be eligible for Board and Council seats; to foundation support incl. branding, marketing, legal, and business development.
The foundation’s executive director, Lee M. Williams, said: “We’re excited to be working with our members and community friends on the public launch of our beta site; their feedback is extremely important in helping us evolve and develop our offering,” said Lee. “With partners already contributing projects to the platform, members continuously showing their support, and the launch of our new beta site, we’re really excited about the next steps.
“The foundation stands for collaboration and for community, and CTIA will provide an excellent forum to meet and share ideas, perspectives and insights with new and existing supporters of the Symbian Foundation community. Our role is to help create a mass technological movement towards open source for mobile, and to support a community in creating the most powerful software platform the world has ever seen,” continued Lee.
As previously announced, the foundation plans to move the foundation platform to open source in the next year. This will make the platform code available to all for free, bringing additional innovation and engaging an even broader community in future developments. The foundation software licensing model and governance structure have been selected to secure transparency, encourage contribution and maintain platform consistency. The foundation will promote collaboration, contributions and active participation, and will operate as a meritocracy.