Symbian Completes Transition To Open Source

Posted by timothy on Thursday February 4, 2010 @09:12AM from the still-a-contender-or-not dept.

Grond writes "Symbian, maker of the the world's most popular mobile operating system, has completed the transition to a completely open platform months ahead of schedule. While the kernel was opened up last year, the entire platform is now open source, primarily under the Eclipse Public License. A FAQ is available with more information about the platform opening." Adds an anonymous reader, linking to PC Magazine's story on the transition: "By putting Symbian fully in the public domain, the Symbian Foundation is pitting it against Google's Android. Symbian is well known across most of the world, but it's mostly a foreign curiosity in the US, AT&T is the only carrier that currently has a symbian phone in its lineup, the Nokia E71x."

1 of 189 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Pet peeve: "public domain" by QuoteMstr · 2010-02-04 09:19 · Score: 5, Informative

Placing code under an open-source license is not the same as putting it in the "public domain". Code under an open source license still has conditions attached to it (even if minimal ones) while code placed in the public domain has no restrictions placed on it of any sort. Code under an open-source license is still copyrighted, but with a permissive license that allows one to do some things normally reserved only for the work's copyright holder. By contrast, a work in the public domain is not covered by copyright law at all.