Disqus
Here’s a little tidbit I missed out on by avoiding the sessions at the BlackBerry Developer Conference last week… RIM pretty much shot down any hope of the OS source code becoming available to the developer community at large.
“We do have an open source management team that is investigating this,” said Cassidy Gentle, a senior RIM software developer. “I would expect some of our Eclipse or Mobile Tools for Java could be made available on an open source basis, but as for our APIs or other software—that’s a pretty big leap,” Gentle said.
The whole BlackBerry Application Storefront announcement had a few people glancing innocuously in Google’s direction, but clearly the similarities to Android end there. It’s not a huge surprise to be honest. RIM has always been pretty open about being closed, not only for the sake of stability, but security as well. Also, despite what the BlackBerry Storm release might insinuate, RIM wants to stay away from imitating as much as possible – if devs want an open sandbox to play in, Android is the way to go.
[via EETimes]
About The Author
Simon Sage
Simon Sage’s education largely surrounded writing, technology and online community, leading him to begin his blogging career at www.BlackBerryCool.com and to quickly discover a vibrant and active community surrounding BlackBerry and mobile technology. In exploring RIM’s platform, he has learned what enterprises are looking for in mobility as well as what makes the innocuous BlackBerry so appealing to them. Recently Simon’s been covering RIM’s gradual move into an already-crowded consumer market, and the impact of burgeoning challengers, such as the iPhone, as well as long-time leaders, like Nokia, on BlackBerry’s advancement. With plenty of content under his belt, Simon will be branching off a bit to see what other smartphone manufacturers are working on while still using BlackBerry as a barometer. At IntoMobile, you can count on his posts being even-handed, well-informed and thought-out.
