Symbian Goes Open-Source; 4 Months Earlier

The Symbian Foundation just announced that they are now Open Source. This is a whole 4 Months ahead of their June Deadline.

While the Open Source Code release is ahead of schedule, the first phones running Symbian Foundation Code wont be out till late this year or early next year (2011).

As you might know, the process of Symbian becoming open source started way back in June 2008 when Nokia announced that they were buying out Symbian, and releasing the code to the public.

The code is expected to become available on the Symbian developer page later today.

(Edit: The Code is now available!)

Now that Symbian is open source, it should be a lot easier for developers to do some really cool stuff with it. Dare I say, Symbian might even be on terms with Maemo’s development, soon ?

Now remember, this doesnt mean anything immediate for us as consumers, yet (For developers, this is a pretty cool deal). While this doesnt mean we’ll see anything awesome on our Symbian devices right now, it DOES mean that we will, by the time devices running the Symbian Foundation code come out towards the end of the year.

Until then, we’d like to say Congratulations to the whole Symbian Foundation team on working so hard and achieving their Goal 4 Months early ! We’ve always been big fans, and we cant wait to see where you guys will take Symbian.

Update: Symbian just posted about it on their Official Blog :

The Symbian Foundation offers free code to everyone to enable them to contribute openly to the future of mobile

SAN FRANCISCO, US, and LONDON, UK, 4 February, 2010 – The Symbian Foundation today completed the open source release of the source code for the world’s most widely-used smartphone platform. The Symbian platform, which has been developed over more than 10 years and has shipped in more than 330 million devices around the world, is now completely open and the source code is available for free. The transition of this market-leading platform from proprietary code to open source is the largest in software history. The move has been completed four months ahead of schedule and provides the basis for unlimited mobile development based on innovation and openness.

Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the code for any purpose, whether that be for a mobile device or for something else entirely. This strategic move provides the Symbian ecosystem with greater potential for innovation, faster time-to-market and the opportunity to develop on the platform for free. Symbian’s commitment to openness also includes complete transparency in future plans, including the publication of the platform roadmap and planned features up to and including 2011. Anyone can now influence the roadmap and contribute new features.

Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation, comments: “The development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry, and rapid innovation on a global scale will be the result. When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open source release of the platform by mid-2010 and it’s because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we’ve reached it well ahead of schedule.”

IDC Analyst John Delaney remarks: “It’s increasingly important for smartphone platforms to offer developers something unique. The placing into open source of the world’s most widely-used smartphone platform emphatically fits that bill. It will be exciting to see where this takes the industry.”

All 108 packages containing the source code of the Symbian platform can now be downloaded from Symbian’s developer web site (tiny.symbian.org/open), under the terms of the Eclipse Public License and other open source licenses. Also available for download are the complete development kits for creating applications (the Symbian Developer Kit) and mobile devices (the Product Development Kit). These kits are compatible with Symbian^3, the very latest version of the platform, which is now fully open source and will be “feature complete” during Q1 of this year.

Update 2 : Videos !

Symbian CEO Lee Williams Tweeting :

The Symbian Platform is Now Fully Open! :

An Introduction to the Symbian System Model :

Lee Williams on Symbian, Open Sourced. Short Version :

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Clinton Jeff

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