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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."
Since Nokia is phone manufacturer itself and main supporter of Symbian, I really hope they open source their drivers for different phones too. Nokia is already moving in that direction with Qt and it doesn't impact their main business as a phone manufacturer. Only problem would be if those drivers use licensed patents from other manufacturers though.
Android being open source is practically useless because you cannot get drivers for any phone. Sure you can see the OS code and tinker around it (if you are able to get overly complex development environment set up), but you are unable to use it on your phone or do pretty much anything with it. It's only good for phone manufacturers.
If Nokia also were to release drivers for their phones, this would be huge victory against Android.
People these days, with all the overloading talk of "intellectual property" don't even know what "public domain" means. I see it all too often with my friends and family. It's getting to the point that copyright is so overreaching (and has been for so long), that few people even know what it means when a work no longer is under copyright.
That said, having Symbian under an open source licence is definitely a nice thing.
According to the FAQ you can now get all the source and can (at least theoretically) build the OS and various applications. Groovy.
Setting aside the fact that just building all of the pieces is complicated (see the FAQ), and also setting aside the fact that many phones will refuse to run homemade, un-signed builds, you might run into issues with patents:
Having the source under an open license is just one step on the path to personal control over your phone and freedom to use, share, and modify the software running on it.
coding is life
You are vastly underestimating Nokia and Maemo. As another poster has already mentioned, once Nokia moves past their current Symbian (cash cow) vs. Maemo (new kid) stage and puts their full weight behind Maemo, Maemo will become a dominant player in the smartphone market. I have no doubt of this.
Believing that Nokia will not succeed is a very limited US-centric view. True, they are just not as strong a player in the US as in the rest of the world. But, remember that Nokia still has the most market share worldwide, far, far more than Android/Google or Apple today. While certainly the "A" teams are growing, they have a long way to go to even begin to compete with the installed base of Nokia. And consider that innovation from Nokia is starting to pick up steam again, especially in the smartphone market outside the US.
Symbian will be replaced by Maemo in the high end smartphone market. I've owned many Symbian based phones over the years and generally they have worked well, although sometimes the UI has been a little slow. I don't dislike Symbian, but I believe it's nearing the end of it's useful life when considering the possibilities of Linux-based Maemo.