With BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) making a shift to its QNX-based BlackBerry 10 (BB10) operating system early next year, the BlackBerry Jam Americas event in San Jose this week witnessed Bob Taniguchi - chief of RIM's developer evangelism team - highlighting the fact that RIM's once-notoriously-secret developer programme has become increasingly transparent.

Noting that RIM was now banking on openness, open source, and giving coders several ways into the forthcoming BB10 platform, Taniguchi said at the event that the company is aware of the need of keeping long-term BlackBerry app makers on the platform, along with bringing in new programmers.

Admitting that present BlackBerry developers are "the hardest to bring on board," Taniguchi said, referring to BB10's shift to C and C++, that it was quite surprising to find "the expectation that we'd carry on doing the same thing from long-term developers."

Stressing on the tools and options which will be available for the new platform, Taniguchi - who earlier spearheaded Microsoft's original MVP programme - said that RIM would give the developers "multiple" entry points, as well as more than one SDK.

Pointing out that the new BB10 platform underscores "different flavours" for developers, Taniguchi said that, with HTML5 developers and C and C++ game developers developing new mobile apps alongside one another, it is evident that the new platform will have a "much broader appeal."