Line in the sand
We brought Chandhok's attention to our earlier report on the creation of QuIC, in particular our speculation that the reason Qualcomm created it as a subsidiary was to maintain a nice, clear divide between what it wants to keep to itself and what it wants to donate to the open source community.
"It's a separate company for a reason; we think the way we go about doing things in the subsidiary can be more flexible," said Chandhok. "We wanted to give engineers a separate part of the business to do open source." That sounds like a confirmation to us.
So where does that dividing line lie? Is Qualcomm just going to contribute the bare minimum it has to in order to gain access to the community? "We think the ARM ecosystem is important, which is why we give back," said Chandhok. "It's not just going to be little scraps to the open source community - judge us by the value of the contributions we make."
Our interview was actually conducted in two parts, because we were interrupted by a Symbian Foundation executive who clearly needed to speak to Chandhok as a matter of urgency. Given that the announcement of QuIC joining the Symbian Foundation as a board member came a matter of hours after that interruption, we're confident the news was being finalised at that moment.
