February 4, 2010

Symbian OS Goes Open Source



As of today, the source code of Symbian 3 mobile OS (the successor of previous Symbian versions, S60, S40 and others) is open and free to use. Nokia had acquired Symbian back in 2008, turned the consortium that makes the software into the Symbian foundation, and has now decided to make it available to all phone manufacturers. The source code is published under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

Although it’s the most popular mobile OS, powering some 330 million phones, Symbian has been in some sort of a limbo lately. On one side, it competed against the increasingly popular (and completely closed) iPhone, while many manufacturers, such as Motorola, opted to use the open source Android, which offers a much more similar experience to iPhone than most Symbian phones.

Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, claims that the new, open Symbian has an advantage over Android. Symbian is fully open, he says, while “about a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more. And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary.”

Still, one can’t help but wonder whether Symbian is a bit late to the game here. Many manufacturers have already all but ditched Windows Mobile and Symbian in favor of Android, and some of them (like Motorola with their Droid) have been quite successful with Android-based devices. Whether the new version of Symbian, together with the move to open source, will be enough to make Symbian interesting to manufacturers, remains to be seen.

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