Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Nokia to Acquire and Open Source Symbian

Posted by timothy on from the to-fight-an-android-you-must-become-one dept.

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.

2 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Re:symbian development by blackpaw · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. This means nothing by jonwil · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.