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Nokia Takes Control of Symbian

Posted by simoniker on from the symbiosis dept.

jpatokal writes "CNN reports: Nokia has bought out Psion's share of Symbian, pushing its stake in the mobile phone OS to a dominant 63%. This means rivals like Siemens and Samsung may now pretty much be forced to choose between proprietary Nokia or Microsoft technology. Symbian may be the more open of the two, but GPL it ain't - does Linux now have an edge?" We reported on a rumor to this effect late last year.

2 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Things have changed alot... by blorg · · Score: 5, Informative
    "Samsung and Siemens will also probably prefer paying Nokia since it's a japanese company (national loyalty is very strong in Japan, unless things have changed alot since I last did geography)."

    Nokia is a Finnish company.

  2. Re:Open != effectiveness by twalk · · Score: 5, Informative

    The fact that this post got +5 Informative goes to show that the moderators really are on crack, and that many /.ers really don't know much about PalmOS development, but like to spout off their incorrect ideas anyway.

    GCC, GDB, and Pilrc (resource compiler) have been availible for a long time. POSE (Palm OS Emulator) is also completely open source and maintained by PalmSource. Right there is a complete open source dev environment.

    OS documentation is pretty complete, up to and including info on many of the internal data structures. There's also several easy to access newsgroups, faqs, books, etc, with tons of info for doing practically anything you could imagine.

    Really, after doing some side programming on the Palm for 3+ years, I've never seen anyone who's had as much trouble as this guy's said he had. Heck, I've got a better dev enviroment, docs, etc, for Palm, than the solaris & linux systems that I use at my full time job.

    PS, PalmSource is now working on a fully integrated & free Eclipse dev environment...