Symbian releases source code, now get it free

By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 04 February 2010, 18:41 IST
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Bangalore: Nokia plans to make symbian completely open source have finally been fulfilled. Symbian will now release its source code which can be used by anyone for free. "The dominant operating system provider out there is Symbian and now we are offering developers the ability to do so much more," says Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation, according to Wired. Symbian operating system is used in most of the Nokia phones and has been shipped in more than 330 million devices worldwide. In 2008, Nokia, one of Symbian's largest customers, acquired a major share in the company. Nokia then created the Symbian Foundation to distribute the platform as an open source project, and began the process of opening up the source code that year. Since Google Android has come up, which is based on Linux Kernel and is also open source, Symbian market has gone down a bit. Symbian's move to open source has been completed four months ahead of schedule and it offers mobile developers new ways to innovate, says Williams. Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the Symbian code for any device, from mobile phone to a tablet. Speaking about Android William said, "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." Symbian is also ahead of Android in that it will publish its platform roadmap and planned features up to 2011, he says. "Open source is also about open governance. It's about letting someone other than one control point guide the feature set and the asset base," he added. It is difficult to predict whether Symbian going open source will directly boost up its usage by mobile makers. But it is definitely a positive move by Symbian and is perfectly posed to challenge the Androids of the world.