I wish RIM would not schedule conferences during Jewish Holidays or else I would have gone… On the other hand Rick Merritt of EE Times provided some very interesting facts in his recap of the BlackBerry Developers Conference. Most of it was more detailed then what I have been hearing elsewhere but not surprising. Like the fact that the Storm prototypes at the conference had many glitches and responded erratically to touch.
He also describes some detail about RIM looking into supporting:
- 3-D graphics based on Java Standard OpenGL ES
- SQLite API to link to corporate or web databases
- Advanced zoom and flash
- Improved speech recognition and text to speech
- Better Bluetooth keyboards
Most of them were to be expected or just evolutions but one really stuck out and surprised me since this is the first I heard of it. Turns out that Rick was sitting in a hour long presentation by RIM engineers about Java application programing interfaces. While there somebody (anybody know who?) asked if RIM will be making its source code available like Google did with Android.
The response:
“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.
Nothing groundbreaking here but I did not even know that RIM was considering open sourcing anything. RIM has to be one of the most closed source operating systems out there…
So what do you think? Will RIM ever release anything open source?
