04 February 2010

Symbian Goes Completely Open
Source 4 Months Earlier Than Planned!

The transition process is over and the whole source code behind more than a ten-year old Symbian OS is 100% open source and is expected to be offered for free through Symbian developer page starting today.

“The dominant operating system provider out there is Symbian,” says Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, “and now we are offering developers the ability to do so much more.”

The transition from proprietary code to open source is the largest in software history, claims the Symbian Foundation. Transition process has been completed four months ahead of schedule and it offers mobile developers new ways to innovate, says Williams.

One of Nokia's reasons for creating Symbian Foundation and making Symbian open source was to drive innovation by attracting developers and now when Symbian is finally open source, any individual or organization can take, use and modify the Symbian code for any device, from a smartphone to a tablet.

“About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more,” says Williams. “And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary.”

“Open source is also about open governance,” Williams added. “It’s about letting someone other than one control point guide the feature set and the asset base.”