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Symbian Foundation Takes First Step In Open Sourcing Mobile OS

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the many-options-to-play-with dept.

readthemall writes to let us know that the Symbian Foundation has released the first of several packages in their plan to open source the entire Symbian mobile OS. "On Wednesday, Symbian made available its first package covered by the EPL, the OS Security Package, according to Symbian developer Craig Heath. 'The OS Security Package source code is now available under the EPL, and it is the very first package to be officially moved from the closed Symbian Foundation License (SFL) to... the EPL,' Heath wrote in a blog post. Heath said the EPL would allow the security package to bypass export regulations in the UK, where the Symbian code is legally based."

2 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Okay... by SpinyNorman · · Score: 4, Informative

    You should soon be able to use Qt for Symbian development.

    Nokia own both Symbian and Qt, and the Qt labs blog is reporting Qt being ported to S60.

    http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/06/29/port-of-qtwebkit-to-s60/

    Note that Qt is an entire cross-platform library, not just for GUI - it includes stuff like threads, network comms, XML even WebKit!

  2. Symbian has 49.5% ww smartphone market share by MagicMerl · · Score: 4, Informative

    For developers looking to make money, and use a very rich set of APIs/functionality, Symbian is the way to go. Gartner recently announced that Symbian has 49.5% of ww smart phone market share (300m+ devices). The distribution channel potential is there for developers to take advantage of now - not some unknown time in the future. Note that Symbian also has Runtime dev environments for Web, Python, and Adobe Flash Lite - who else has that?