Symbian Completes Transition To Open Source

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."

Comments

"By putting Symbian fully in the public domain"

[Anonymous Coward]

Except they didn't, in any sense of the term, put it in the public domain.

http://maemo.org/

[Colin Smith]

It's even Linux. Hell, it's Debian.

http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/

 

Re:http://maemo.org/

[Toy G]

Maemo is suffering from the US-centric view of the average IT media. It's simply the best smartphone OS... because it's not a phone OS, it's a full desktop OS with a phone-friendly UI, more or less like the iPhone. But differently from the iPhone, it's a standard Linux, it's open to all sorts of hacks, and you don't have to pay rent to develop for it (at least not yet). I have one, and it's mind-blowing. I can run anything I want without worrying about "jailbreaking" and other absurd locks. Once the price goes down a little, it will become the perfect device for, well, almost anything. (Yeah, the screen is resistive, but the quality and resolution... man, the iPhone looks very cheap in comparison).

What is holding Maemo back, at the moment is:
- the above-mentioned US-centric attitude
- fear. Many in Nokia are scared of dropping their old Symbian workhorse, which is still immensely profitable even if it managed to irritate almost every single user it ever had, and never managed to establish a decent ecosystem of third-party developers. They are afraid that Maemo (an untested platform in the wider market) might fail, so they don't allocate enough resources to it, which leads to unpolished releases, which in turn means they don't feel confident enough to push Maemo-based devices as hard as they should...
- internal politics. In Nokia, Symbian is the establishment, the cash-cow, the power, the suits, the veteran developers; Maemo is the skunkwork geek project, youthful and technically light-years ahead, but bringing a revolution in how things are done, with an unclear business model... not everyone is on board yet. Sometimes the friction shows.

Re:http://maemo.org/

[Mulder3]

"(...)so basically this announcement means that they are open sourcing their low end crappy OS which has pretty much failed in the smart phone space." ARE YOU SERIOUS??? Symbian is the leading(not the best, but surely, is the leading) Smartphone OS... Actually, there is more Symbian smartphones in the world that Android+iPhone combined... If you don't believe me, check the numbers... (Worldwide, not only US numbers) Just because Symbian is not popular in the US, doesn't mean it ist't popular at all... To you guys, US people, the concept of smart phone is new, i know(mainly because of your crappy cell phone market) but in Europe, smartphones is really not a new thing... I had my first Smarphone 6 years ago... A Nokia 7650(Symbian)