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The team at Telco2.0 have run some good conferences, and there’s much to applaud in their Manifesto. Recently, the Telco2.0 blog has run a couple of hit-and-miss pieces of analysis on the Symbian Foundation. There’s a lot of speculation in their pieces, and alas, their imagination has run a bit wild. The second of these pieces, in particular, is more “miss” than “hit”. Entitled “Symbian goes open – or does it?”, the piece goes most clearly off the rails when it starts speculating about Symbian Signed:

…the Symbian signing process doesn’t just apply to changes to Symbian itself — it applies to all applications developed for use on Symbian, at least ones that want to use a list of capabilities that can be summed up as “everything interesting or useful”. I can’t even sign code for my own personal use if it requires, say, SMS functionality. And this also affects work in other governance regimes. So if I write a Python program, which knows no such thing as code-signing and is entirely free, I can’t run it on an S60 device without submitting to Symbian’s scrutiny and gatekeeping. And you though Microsoft was an evil operating system monopolist…

This makes the Symbian signing process sound awful. But wait a minute. Isn’t there a popular book, “Mobile Python – rapid prototyping of applications on the mobile platform“, written by Jurgen Scheible and Ville Tuulos, that highlights on the contrary just how simple it is to get going with sophisticated Python applications on S60 devices? Yep. And what do we find as early as page 45 of the book? A two-line program that sends an SMS message:

import messaging
messaging.sms_send(“+14874323981″, u”Greetings from PyS60”)

I tried it. It took less than an hour to download and install the SIS files for the latest version of PyS60 from Sourceforge, and then to type in and run this program. (Of course, you change the phone number before testing the app.) Nowhere in the process is there any submitting of the newly written program “to Symbian’s scrutiny and gatekeeping”. The fanciful claims of the Telco2.0 piece are refuted in just two lines of Python.

So what’s really going on here? How is it that normally intelligent analysts and developers often commit schoolboy howlers when they start writing about Symbian Signed? (Unfortunately, the Telco2.0 writers are by no means unique in getting the Symbian Signed facts wrong.) And why, when people encounter glitches or frustrations in the implementation of Symbian Signed, are they often too ready to criticise the whole system, rather than being willing to ask what small thing they might do differently, to get things working again?

I suspect three broader factors are at work:

1. An over-casual approach to the threat of mobile malware

Symbian Signed is part of an overall system that significantly reduces the threat of mobile viruses and the like. Some developers or analysts sometimes give the impression that they think they stand immune from malware – that it’s only a problem that impacts lesser mortals, and that the whole anti-malware industry is a “cure that’s worse than the disease”. Occasionally I sympathise with this view, when I’m waiting for my desktop PC to become responsive, with its CPU cycles seemingly being consumed by excessive scanning and checking for malware. But then I remember the horrors that ensue if the defences are breached – and I remember that the disease is actually worse than the cure.

If we in the mobile industry take our eye off the security ball and allow malware to take root in mobile phones in ways similar to the sad circumstances of desktop PCs, it could produce a meltdown scenario in which end users decide in droves that the extra intelligence of smart mobile phones brings much more trouble than it’s worth. And smartphones would remain of only niche interest. For these reasons, at least the basic principles of Symbian Signed surely deserve support.

2. A distrust of the motivation of network operators or phone manufacturers

The second factor at work is a distrust of control points in the allocation of approvals for applications to have specific capabilities. People reason something like this:

• OK, maybe some kind of testing or approvals process does makes sense
• But I don’t trust Entity-X to do the approving – they have mixed motivations.

Entity-X could be a network operator, that may fear losing (for example) their own SMS revenues if alternative IM applications were widely installed on their phones. Or Entity-X could be a device manufacturer, like Apple, that might decide to withhold approval from third party iPhone applications that provide download music stores to compete with iTunes.

Yes, there’s a potential risk here. But there are two possible approaches to this risk:

1. Decide that there’s no possible solution, and therefore the power of a system like Symbian Signed should be criticised and diminished
2. Work to support more of the decision making happening in a fully transparent and independent way, outside of the influence of mixed motivations.

The second approach is what’s happening with the Symbian Foundation. The intent with the Symbian Foundation is to push into the public sphere, not only more and more of the source code of the Symbian Platform, but also as much of the decision-making as possible – including the rules and processes for approval for Symbian Signing.

Incidentally, the likely real-world alternative to a single, unified scheme for reviewing and signing applications is that there will be lots of separately run, conflicting, fragmented signing schemes. That would be a BAD outcome.

3. A belief that openness trumps security

This brings us to the final factor. I suspect that people reason as follows:

• OK, I see the arguments for security, and (perhaps) for quality assurance of applications
• But Symbian Signed puts an obstacle in the way of openness, and that’s a worse outcome
• Openness is the paramount virtue, and needs to win.

As a great fan of openness, I find myself tempted by this argument from time to time. But it’s a misleading argument. Instead, freedom depends on a certain stability in the environment (including a police force and environmental inspectors). Likewise, openness depends on a basic stability and reliability in the network, in the underlying software, and in the way the ecosystem operates. Take away these environmental stability factors, and you’ll lose the ability to meaningfully create innovative new software.

The intention behind Symbian Signed to help maintain the confidence of the industry in the potential of smartphones – confidence that smartphones will deliver increasing benefits without requiring debilitating amounts of support or maintenance.

It’s true that the rules of Symbian Signed can take a bit of learning. But hey, lots of other vital pieces of social or technical infrastructure likewise take time to appreciate. In my mind, the effort is well worth it: I see Symbian Signed as part of the bedrock of meaningful openness, instead of some kind of obstacle.