RIM VP: BlackBerry 10 SDK will be “committed to open source”

Today is the second and final day of BlackBerry DevCon Europe, the end-point of a worldwide developer road-show that began in San Francisco back in October. It’s a crucial event for newly-appointed RIM chief Thorsten Heins -- having pinned his hopes on BlackBerry 10, the company’s upcoming replacement for the ageing BlackBerry OS, he needs to stimulate enough grassroots interest for the platform to develop a healthy ecosystem of third-party apps and content. If he fails, BB10 risks becoming a proprietary footnote in the history of mobile operating systems, dwarfed by the likes of Android, iOS and perhaps even Windows Phone.

This perilous situation perhaps explains the noises currently being made by RIM’s VP for developer relations, Alec Saunders. Speaking to the the Inquirer yesterday, Saunders claimed that the company is “super committed to open source”. “One of the biggest complaints I heard when I joined the company was from developers who said you know I can't use open source on BlackBerry OS and that means it takes longer to write code for BlackBerry and makes it more expensive,” he noted. He went on to give some details:

In fact, our entire web platform, so the Webworks framework which takes HTML5 outside the browser in a secure environment and our Ripple web IDE is all being done as open source development out there in the open so we are really committed to driving this open community commitment.

PR gibberish aside (committed to commitment?), this seems like a genuine effort, though we’re not sure it justifies the Inquirer’s blanket headline “RIM’s Blackberry 10 Native SDK will be open source”. The OS is built on top of QNX, the proprietary Unix-based system that RIM acquired from Harman International back in April, but the SDK includes a number of well-known open source components, including the cross-platform UI framework Qt, the scripting language Lua and the 3D physics engine Bullet.

During his keynote yesterday, Heins revealed that BlackBerry App World -- the company’s existing app marketplace -- passed the two billion download mark last month, averaging six million apps downloaded per day. With the first BlackBerry 10 devices due to hit shelves at some point “later this year” and no backwards compatibility between the new system and legacy Java apps, he better hope that the DevCon attendees jump on the new SDK as soon as it’s released, open source or not.

[via the Inquirer]