Symbian completes open source migration

03 February 2010 – Smartphone platform Symbian has today made its code available for free, effectively completing the platform’s journey to an open source model begun two years ago. The source code was previously only open to members of the organisation, but was opened to everyone via website download at 1400 GMT this afternoon. "This is the largest open source migration effort ever," Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation told BBC News, adding that the organisation was now giving away "billions of dollars" worth of code for free. The move allows any organisation or individual to use and modify the platform's underlying source code "for any purpose.” Despite fierce competition in the sector from the likes of Apple and Google’s Android, Symbian remains the world’s largest smartphone operating system. The Symbian Foundation claims that it has shipped more than 330 million Symbian-based devices to the market to date. 

Williams said that one of the motivations for the move was to speed up the rate at which the ten-year old platform evolved. "When we chatted to companies who develop third-party applications, we found people would spend up to nine months just trying to navigate the intellectual property," he said. "That was really hindering the rate of progress." He also wants to reduce the platform’s reliance on Nokia phones and forecasts that the Finnish vendor will account for "no more than 50 percent" of Symbian phones by the middle of 2011. Nokia acquired 100 percent of Symbian in 2008 in order to start the process of transforming it into an open source platform. Other current members of the Foundation include AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone. ♠ JC 

Source: GSMA

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