Symbian goes open-source and royalty-free
July 17th, 2008There’s been a major shake-up at Symbian, which has made its phone OS open source.
It formed the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of a unified software platform, available for members under a royalty-free licence. It’s expected that the ‘flavours’ of Symbian such as S60, UIQ and MOAP will be united to create one open mobile software platform.
To enable the Foundation, Nokia will acquire the remaining shares of Symbian that it does not already own for £209 million and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation.
It was an unexpected move, even though the phone OS business is drifting toward the open source model via Google Android and Linux.
Symbian has shipped in over 200 million phones, across 235 models. This year already, over 20 new mobile phones have been announced.
