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OS Unlocked as Symbian Goes Open Source

OS Unlocked as Symbian Goes Open Source Mobile phone software organisation The Symbian Foundation has announced that it has finally made the code for its operating system open source. The transition has taken two years as the company originally announced its intentions back in 2008.

The Symbain operating system, most commonly used by Nokia phones, is the most popular in the world. Now that it has become open source it means that any organisation or individual is now able to access, use and modify “for any purpose” the underlying source code for the platform.

The company is hoping to draw new developers to help and speed up improvements in the system, according to a report in theinquirer.net.

Despite being outshone in the smartphone market by Google and Apple, both of whom are more knowledgeable in attracting media attention, the Symbian operating system is actually the most solid on the market. Indeed, Symbian code is present on over 330 million mobile phones, so is very widely used.

It was Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia which bought the software in 2008. Nokia helped set up the non-profit Symbian Foundation which it then supported and assisted in developing the software and overseeing its progress and transition to becoming open source.

A shining example of a successful open source operating system is Google's Android for smartphones, which is Linux-based. Android is already popular with developers and is expected to become the second most widely used platform in the world over the next couple of years.

Previously only members of the Symbian organisation were allowed to access its source code but now all that has changed and it can be downloaded from the company’s website.

Industry News posted by Marilyn on 05 February 2010

Comments

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Very interesting news, time will tell the momentum

This was expected. Now the question surely is, who will gain the developers? I have no experience in either one's developing, but from my far memory recall that at least here in .fi the Symbian coders were hard to find, specialized C++ coding. Don't know now, it might have changed?

Comment posted by Anonymous on 05/02/2010 18:11:51

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