Symbian Goes Open Source
Posted February 6th, 2010 by simon
Currently Symbian is the world’s most popular smartphone operating system and so the announcement that they have just decided to make the code base open source should be met with interest and excitement by developers. The idea is to stimulate some more development in the face of all the apps being released for Apple’s iPhone and the Google Android operating system. The software is actually owned by Nokia and was previously only available via membership in the Symbian Foundation.
The hope is that the platform will now see some development and modernisation. This move has been in the works since 2008 and with over 300 million phones shipped worldwide that run on Symbian it could lead to some interesting developments. Apparently the foundation will continue to monitor phones using the platform to ensure minimum standards are met. They claim this idea was in the works before the iPhone was released and before Android but there is no doubt Symbian has fallen behind in the popularity stakes since then and this should help them claw some attention back.
