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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.
to the phrase, "I'll just put my phone on vibrate."
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Nokia has been known for experimenting with open source in the recent years. This surely was a way to test the waters in community-driven development, to learn how to go along and specially what not to do.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
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.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
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?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
This is an amazing move by the mobile giant(at least in Europe and Asia) and it again shows that they can and will react to what is going on around them. They accepted that they got their ass kicked by Apple/Google and they accepted the challenge which made them buy Trolltech(Qt) and now Symbian. And this buyout is understandable from Nokia's point of view as just last year they paid close to $250million to Symbian in licensing fees.
Now the market is really heating up. After the whole Symbian OS and S60 goes open source Microsoft/Apple will be under lot of pressure to react to this. Even though lot of consumers will not bother if the platform is open or not, once touch devices are unveiled by Nokia, the number of applications that will be developed will be huge. Not to mention the contributions will be from all the major handset vendors (LG, Samsung, Motorola etc). For once I think we have all the evil corporates agree on something whcih looks like will make the consumers life easy.
First breath, " OSS needs to be more DRM and hate the customer attitude friendly. We need to lock this stuff up so the customer can not do what they want!"
Second Breath, "WE are buying the Symbian Phone OS, can we get some free developers on this? we will Open source it! Mmkay? thanks!"
So which is it? did they retract their previous standce that DRM and locking was wonderful and needed?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I hear the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army is even now plotting their counter-attack.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
There's something wrong with my brain.
Every time I read "Symbian" I see "simian" mentally...
which of course lead to my reading your post as "My monkey's on google"
I need to go back to bed.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
1. Symbian OS is shipped in a whole bunch of phones and this move will ensure that current development projects based on the OS are more likely to continue because it became a whole lot cheaper to make a Symbian phone. $4 per unit doesn't sound like a lot but that is a huge margin for a phone manufacturer.
2. The licensing issues for Symbian OS and various UI components will become vastly easier to resolve and make it easier to start a phone project. Symbian OS is currently a web of various source categorizations depending on your partner status level (developer/device creator/semi conductor partner), that doesn't even consider the semi-co base port components, multimedia infrastructure/codecs and the UI (Series 60, UIQ etc).
The UI for Symbian products contains an extremely large amount of functionality you would expect in the base OS.
In the end it's a damn sight easier to do business with tech companies on an open source basis.
3. It raises interesting questions about whether there will be continued investment in Symbian oriented technologies. One technology question area that stands out is the kernel. The current Symbian OS kernel (called EKA2 by the way) is microkernel design optimised for the various ARM architectures with low latency features and a small memory footprint.
Application processors for mobile processors are starting to look towards SMP designs in order to increase performance without incurring large power consumption penalties. The Symbian kernel and OS design doesn't currently support SMP, so it is possible that the Linux kernel is the direction to go in - obsoleting the EKA2 kernel at some point in the future for high end mobile devices.
However it is probably worth pointing out that whilst the Linux kernel works well for SMP systems for scalable performance whether it does this AND manages to be good for power saving/consumption is possibly less proven.
4. There are questions over how open is this environment? If a $1500 dollar license is required to get the source, is this open? Doesn't quite sound like it.
5. How will this open source environment operate? There appear to be problems with open source projects which involve a dominant partner. IBM - Eclipse, Sun - Java,OpenOffice,MySQL are notable examples.
Being open source is good for doing business but there are many practicalities to work out which make a technology good or bad open source.
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.
Imagine, a full Linux install (at least on phones like the N95 etc), running skype over wifi... I don't think the phone companies would like that.
I know there's a Hell, I've worked in retail.
Mod me down on this, but my money is on Nokia. I haven't seen a Google / Android phone yet.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
They are already working on SMP support as can be seen here:
http://www.symbian.com/news/pr/2007/pr20079433.html
This is all just my personal opinion.
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.
Skype currently runs on the N800 etc Internet Tablets (which don't handle calls or SMS), not on the average cellphone It's a dream, but a Linux friendly Nokia, that could handle apps such as skype could mean people on bad/expensive/silly tarrifs have the ability to use skype from a normal cell/mobile phone, thus eliminating a lot of cost. Though, mentioning the idea to the world at large gives cell companies a headstart into stopping such developments! Still, would be nice to see 'Nokibuntu' or something one day!
I know there's a Hell, I've worked in retail.
My wife loves her Sybian, and prefers it to me sometimes.