Symbian Foundation Takes First Step In Open Sourcing Mobile OS

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."

Comments

get rid of symbian signed..

[mehrotra.akash]

whats the point of this if all apps need to be signed by an external authority?

Re:get rid of symbian signed..

[martok]

That's the thing I don't understand about the whole Symbian open sourcing and the excitement around it. Unless I am off-base, it's not like a programmer will be able to pick up the Symbian codebase, make a modification, compile a new kernel and flash it into his phone. If that's the level of open-sourcing we're talking about here, disabling 'Symbian Signed' will be trivial. Is this geared more toward device manufacturers? IE. end-users and developers need not care?

Okay...

[rumith]

Look, that's definitely good news (especially the part of the Symbian Foundation using EPL instead of inventing some special license of their own). But does it really matter that much now? I mean that writing apps for Symbian is a horrible experience (as has been highlighted multiple times here on Slashdot, too), and now that Android has arrived and brought a much more friendly programming environment, this step is too little, too late.

Decline of Windows Mobile?

[Darkness404]

With Symbian and Android now free, what is the reason for even producing a Windows Mobile handset anymore? I mean, why pay extra for a license when you can just customize your own OS for next to nothing?

Re:Decline of Windows Mobile?

[Freetardo Jones]

And such thinking gave us the Year of the Linux desktop years ago! Oh wait... The licensing costs for WinMo are a pittance to the device manufacturers when it comes to the total cost to make the device especially since all the big phone companies definitely negotiate bulk license rates when dealing with Microsoft. If you honestly think these big phone manufacturers that rake in 10s of billions in revenue a year care about that mere pittance they throw to Microsoft for WinMo you are horrible naive. It's the same reason why all the nerd rage over the licensing costs of H.264 or MP3 etc is meaningless to any major device manufacturer as it's a mere pittance to their bottom line.

Because you don't get kickbacks from OS

[SuperKendall]

With Symbian and Android now free, what is the reason for even producing a Windows Mobile handset anymore?

The Microsoft kickbacks, of course.

Otherwise you'd just run Android, I don't see the appeal of free Symbian myself when you could have something more modern and with better application potential.

Re:Symbian has 49.5% ww smartphone market share

[ivoras]

Gartner recently announced that Symbian has 49.5% of ww smart phone market share (300m+ devices)

Yeah, but... which Symbian? What non-developers usually don't get is that currently Symbian is a lot like Linux - strictly speaking it's little more then an OS kernel with a bunch of low-level APIs. What users see, the GUI, is fragmented in the same way GNOME and KDE are fragmented, and with much worse results. The developers must build different versions of their application (UIQ, S60, others) for different devices, and the users cannot simply install "the other one" enabling them to run applications written for other devices. If someone says to you that there's an application doing X "for Symbian", you better pray it's for your specific little version of Symbian. If you a have Nokia device and the app is for Sony Ericsson, you're simply out of luck and there is no way to run the app on your device.

And then there are other stupid mistakes, of which the worst one is having to license your app with Symbian foundation (or whoever) to be able to install it on other devices. Imagine if you developed a Windows application (of which, note, there are gazillions today) and have to pay Microsoft for the privilege of being able to install it on other people's devices. Not going to work, is it? All other modern platforms either don't have this kind of "protection" at all (Windows Mobile, Android) or have it in a much less obtrusive way (iPhone, Pre).