Nokia releases S60 WebKit sources

[roland.geisler at nokia.com]

Hi,

I am at the moment sitting at the World Wide Web Conference 2006 in
Edinburgh where a few minutes ago Nokia announced to open source its S60
WebKit sources. We will release our code under the terms of the open
source BSD License, and our source code will be made available through
the WebKit Open Source Project site. The code that we are contributing
includes many mobility components that are needed for a basic browser,
including items such as a memory manager, mobile usability improvements
and a reference user interface. In addition we have prepared a number of
testing tools and documentation to get you as a developer quickly
started. More information can be found from our open source site at
http://webkit.opendarwin.org/. As we are moving forward we will be
making improvements to tools and release further features.

It has been exciting and at times challenging one and a half years for
us to develop our new mobile Web browser for the S60 software platform
based on Apple's and KDE's fantastic Safari and Konqueror browser code.
In 2Q Nokia started shipping our first S60 3rd edition mobile phones
with the new browser, and I am pleased to mention that our customers
have been highly pleased with the good performance, compliance and
feature set of our new mobile browser. I wanted to take the opportunity
to thank the KDE community and the Apple Safari team for having built
what is today WebCore and JavaScriptCore, a large part of your code is
now running in our Nokia mobile phones. 

After having focused for the past months mostly on our first browser
software release, we at Nokia felt that it is time to start looking
ahead. With the decision of open sourcing our S60 WebKit code we hope to
start a fruitful collaboration with the open source community and
partner companies to further develop the Web Browser for S60 and
proliferate the engine to other mobile software platforms. We believe
that working in the open source will create an innovative ecosystem for
mobile browser development that will benefit the mobile industry and
browser industry at large. We at Nokia are excited to take this step,
and we are looking forward to working together with many of you from the
community and partner companies in the near future. If you would like to
contact us, please feel free to send us email either directly, via the
WebKit mailing list or meet us on the WebKit IRC channel.

Best regards,

Your Web Browser for S60 team at Nokia,

Roland Geisler
Head of Marketing & Strategy, S60 Browser
Nokia

PS: Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.