racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

One of the issues that were circling the Nokia and Microsoft partnership was the future of Symbian.

Symbian was taken over by Nokia last 2008, hoping that it would be their weapon against Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Unfortunately it never happened, and Nokia fell even further behind. Then came the partnership with Microsoft with their Windows 7 Mobile OS; this resulted in Symbian becoming an “unwanted child”. And now, they became (partly) open source.

This would have been good news for Third-party Symbian devs out there, but it’s not all open yet. According to Petra Söderling, head of open source at Nokia’s Symbian division:

“The commercial product which is sold to customers is not ‘fully open’ [...] due to various consumer protection legislation, warranty and security reasons.”

The question now is: Will new developers still come and use Symbian, knowing that it won’t work with Nokia phones in the future?

[Article via: Thinq | Image via: Clive Darr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Is it fair if Microsoft sues US companies who imports and sells products or services from other companies outside the country who use “pirated” versions of Windows?

The proposal is still under discussion, but it’s already getting negative reactions:

If a company overseas uses a pirated version of Excel, let’s say, keeping track of how many parts it has shipped or whatever, and then sends some parts to General Motors or any large company to incorporate into the finished product, Microsoft can sue *not the overseas supplier* but General Motors, for unfair competition. So can the state’s Attorney General.

How will this affect local companies in the Philippines? If your company’s using even just one pirated Windows OS, it will basically mean that your US buyer may stop doing business with you. It will go down to two options: buy the right amount of Windows licenses or use Opensource/Free Software OS like GNU/Linux.

The choice is yours.

[Article via: TechDirt | Image via: Steve Jervetson]

Google has decided not to release the source code for Honeycomb, the latest Android version.

Despite being touted by Google that Android is an opensource project, it seems to be violating its own marketing campaign. Android is based on Linux–a GPL compliant kernel–and therefore the source code must be released to the public. The company says that it isn’t releasing the code for now because of the reasons below:

Android 3.0, Honeycomb, was designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes and improves on Android favorites such as widgets, multi-tasking, browsing, notifications and customization. While we’re excited to offer these new features to Android tablets, we have more work to do before we can deliver them to other device types including phones. Until then, we’ve decided not to release Honeycomb to open source. We’re committed to providing Android as an open platform across many device types and will publish the source as soon as it’s ready.

Questions abound at what will happen to the next version of Android. With Ice Cream coming, will people still wait for the Honeycomb source code to be released? Will it also be opensource or not? These questions can only be answered when the Ice Cream comes around the corner.

[Article via: Engadget | Image via: Jake Maymar]

It’s been several weeks since I published PayPal: One Great Way to Improve the Philippine Economy. Quite a number of people have expressed support and interest. A few have provided their insights and inputs into the matter. Others even have dissenting opinions, or at least don’t think that having PayPal would be helpful enough.

Links to these other posts and news items are available here. Reader fedeback can be found on the comment thread.

Things haven’t been quite slow these past days. I guess everyone’s busy. But here are milestones, so far.

* We’ve registered a domain, www.paypal4ph.com and even set-up an update blog at www.paypal4ph.com/blog (thanks to my colleague “J4s0n”:http://j4s0n.com ).
* We asked uber-cool designer Ia (who also works with us at Enthropia) to create some artwork for the site.
* J4s0n is coding a cool sign-up sheet with an equally cool frontpage (Enthropia is the team behind iBox, which I think is really cool). We can probably ride on the existing signature campaign on petition spot launched last year, which has 812 signatures to date. However, I think it would be good to start fresh (and so everyone who would sign up actually knows what the issues are).
* Mainstream media update: Joey Alarilla (journalist, problogger, father, and Palanca awardee) has written about the *PayPal for the Philippines initiative on CNet Asia*. Joey also writes for Inq7.net and I do hope we make it there, too, one of these days. His fellow Inq7.net journalist Erwin Oliva has also expressed interest in the advocacy, and I do hope we get the much needed mainstream-media mileage.

Other ideas:

* We’re likely to move the advocacy site to a .com.ph domain to support the use.com.ph campaign (and since it’s for the Philippines, anyway!).

Open Source / Collaboration

Sad to say, running an advocacy is not that easy. Firstly, I’m quite rusty as an economist, and after all, being a jack-of-all-trades makes one a master of none. So I’m not your expert on tech and e-commerce either, but I do try to make the most out of what information I can digest from other sources. And one of the things I’ve been a big fan of is OpenSource.

The most important thing I learned from the Open Source movement is that collaboration is key to producing great ideas and great output. Hence, with this in mind, I think it’s best to move forward with the PayPal for the Philippines advocacy as a collaborative activity. We are already doing this, as various people are contributing to advancing the cause in their own ways. However, we need to come up with a more defined and focused output. We need to get our facts and figures straight. We need to be able to talk to the right people (and at the right time).

For one, we need to come up with a whitepaper, as Migs suggested on the original blog post. We need a more solid argument to support our cause, and to help convince the right people (i.e., those in government, the banking sector, and even eBay/PayPal management itself) and in this regard, I think collaborative work is the way to go.

So here’s what our next step would be. I’m hoping for inputs and suggestions on how we can go about with it. For now, we shall be setting up a Wiki on the advocacy page to get started on a draft whitepaper (link later). Any inputs and help (with the appropiate sources and citations needed, of course) would be much appreciated.