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]