Contributions

This site focuses on Nokia open source projects but Nokia acknowledges the value in creating open source software in collaboration with others. A number of our developers are directly involved in creating, refining, testing, using, and supporting open source software. Currently, Nokia hosts, contributes to, and/or sponsors multiple open source projects and initiatives.

Listed below are several examples of open source projects that Nokia has been involved in either by directly contributing code or by sponsoring the work of the developers.

Linux Kernel

Nokia has contributed to the Linux operating system kernel enhancements related to general OMAP support, OMAP/DSP gateway, Bluetooth, journaling flash file systems, power management, 2D graphics support of fbdev-subsystem on OMAP (omapfb), and USB (Universal Serial Bus).

Nokia has also sponsored C++ and thread support for the uClibc C-library for developing embedded Linux systems.

Connectivity

Nokia has contributed extensions to the BlueZ library. The overall goal of BlueZ is to make an implementation of the Bluetooth wireless standards specifications for Linux.

Application Middleware

GnomeVFS is a file system abstraction library allowing applications plugable transparent access to a variety of "real" file systems. Nokia has contributed the GnomeVFS OBEX module, which allows using the GnomeVFS API for file operations on remote devices connected over Bluetooth and OBEX.

Nokia has sponsored the development of GnomeVFS using D-BUS. D-BUS is a message bus system that enables applications to talk to one another (used in place of Bonobo or Corba). It receives messages from applications and routes them to appropriate receiver applications. It is also able to launch an application if it is not already running.

Nokia has also sponsored D-BUS support for GConf. GConf is a system for storing user preferences that makes application preferences more manageable for system administrators. The development work related to GnomeVFS, D-BUS and GConf has been done by Imendio.

Graphical User Interface

Nokia has sponsored the development of several feature enhancements to the Matchbox window manager and user environment including Pango support (for localizing to non-western languages), X composite extension support (support for translucent windows and window shadows), a test suite, and performance and memory optimizations (for example, specific support for 16-bit graphics). The primary author of Matchbox is Matthew Allum at OpenedHand.

GPE is a a Free Software GUI environment for palmtop/handheld computers running the GNU/Linux operating system. Nokia has sponsored the 1.0 release of GPE and the port of GPE to GTK 2.0 by KernelConcepts.

Applications

GTK+ Webcore is a Linux/GTK+ port of Apple Computer Inc.'s WebCore KHTML html rendering engine. The project has developed a KJS javascript interpreter, a KHTML rendering engine, a Qt porting layer, a WebKit API for embedding and a reference browser for demonstrating the functionality of the other components.

Nokia has sponsored the Minimo (Mini Mozilla) project, which focuses on porting the Mozilla browser to small consumer devices and optimizing code-size and footprint for such devices.

GStreamer is a streaming-media framework that provides a comprehensive component library for multimedia applications such as media players, video editors and streaming media broadcasters. Nokia has sponsored development on the Gstreamer core done by Fluendo.

Development Tools

Nokia has sponsored the development of the Scratchbox cross-compilation toolkit for embedded Linux application development. With Scratchbox, resource intensive development tasks such as configuration and cross-compiling, are automated and done on a desktop machine instead of on the target device, making the development process much faster. Scratchbox has been developed by Movial.

Nokia has also sponsored the development of a number of UI component testing and debugging tools available at Freedesktop.org including Xephyr, Xoo, Xresponse and Xrestop. Xephyr is a kdrive X Server that uses a window on a host X Server as its framebuffer. Xoo is a GTK2 based graphical wrapper around a 'Windowed' X Server. It is intended for embedded developers that want to simulate a target device (with an accurate display size, working hardware buttons, etc.) on a desktop machine. Xrestop is an X Server resource usage monitor that uses the XRes extension. Xresponse is a UI interactiveness tester.

Nokia has funded the development the CSiBE Code size benchmark environment for the GCC compiler. CSiBE has been created at the Institute of Informatics at the University of Szeged in Hungary.