Nokia to Acquire and Open Source Symbian

zyzko writes "Nokia has placed an offer on Symbian stock — it currently owns a 48% share and intends to buy the other shareholders out, 91% of the stockholders have already agreed. The press has already labeled this as an countermeasure to fight Android. Nokia has also created Symbian foundation — it might mean more open Symbian." Symbian is "currently the world's dominant smartphone operating system (206 million phones shipped, 18.5 million in Q1 2008)," writes reader thaig, who points out coverage in the Economic Times. If this deal goes through as expected, the Foundation says that selected components of the Symbian operating system would be made available as open source at launch under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0 , with the rest of the platform following over the next two years.

Comments

symbian development

[Keruo]

Is symbian devel environment still considered as form of S/M or has it evolved into something usable during last 3 years?
Haven't tried it since.

Re:symbian development

[blackpaw]

Its become much *much* worse. The number of classes has increased to over 1700. Documentation is terrible. Code signing has immensely complicated everything.

However python has become very capable with solid support from Nokia - we're using it for a commercial project. I suspect Nokia are planning to use it in place of the abomination Java has become on smartphones.

What about Sony?

[neokushan]

Since UIQ is based on Symbian, how will this affect Sony Ericsson phones?
Technically they're in direct competition with Nokia, so if they sell their stake in Symbian, will they come to some sort of licensing agreement or do you think we'll see Sony either develop their own OS or switch to Android/Windows Mobile?

Too little, too late

[Etherized]

Nokia is in a tough spot here. They're still the market leader for smartphones world wide, but Windows Mobile has been biting into that for a while now, and Android is just around the corner. I can't help but equate Symbian to PalmOS - a technical jumble that's frustrating to develop for and nearly impossible to maintain, being attacked by rapidly growing and technically superior competitors.

In the case of Palm, they couldn't fix PalmOS *or* spool up a replacement in time, and they were thus relegated to Yet Another Windows Mobile vendor. I suppose Nokia is trying to avoid that fate by taking over Symbian and throwing enough resources at it to keep it alive and moving forward, but that can't be easy. Nokia also seems to take the Sun view of open source: if you can no longer make money from something, open source it for good will. That's fine, but given how crufty Symbian is and how many alternatives there are now I'm not sure what good that code is going to do anybody.

Either way, I'm sure the other Symbian partners are happy to have it off their hands. Android is clearly the superior platform in the near-term, and divorcing themselves from Symbian allows them to focus their efforts there. Despite that, it's clear that Nokia is resisting Android - maybe to differentiate themselves from the competitors, maybe just to prevent obsoleting all of their existing Symbian resources - but it will be interesting to see if they can ultimately avoid becoming Yet Another Andriod Vendor themselves.

This means nothing

[jonwil]

All the code in the world is useless until I can actually change the software on my phone and make it do what I want and not what some phone company thinks I should and shouldn't be able to do.

Which is why the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner is so good. Decent hardware for a phone (including touch screen, GPS, tri-band GSM, WiFi and Bluetooth) with almost all of the source for the phone being 100% open (and replaceable).
The only closed bits are the GSM stack (which runs on a seperate baseband processor and talks to the host CPU via 100% documented open standards, all the stuff you need to know to talk to the baseband is documented and open), the driver for the GPS chip (people are reverse engineering it and making an open source replacement) and some of the fancy stuff to do with the GPU.

And with regards to the GPU (which is aparently being dropped from the next model), the only closed thing is the official docs and specs provided to the OpenMoko team from the GPU vendor. The GPU vendor is quite happy for the OpenMoko team to produce and open source a driver for the GPU (and even a new set of specs for it), they just dont want any code or specs created by THEM being released publicly (having everything that goes public created by a 3rd party helps with legal issues I guess)

The hardware is as open as they can legally go too. For example, they have released the same CAD drawings for the case and such as they themselves used to produce the molds for it. So if you want to make a new case in a color (or material) they dont offer (such as a rubber case so it can survive being dropped on the ground), the info is there.

Re:SMP support

[Ilgaz]

Near all Symbian phones have dual CPU but you wouldn't want a SMP aware Symbian phone. Why? Because the main CPU does a very critical thing, call handling. Whatever happens in background must not prevent user from calling and especially emergency calls.