The Symbian Foundation’s announced that it would make its code open source in 2008 and has now completed the move. It means that any organisation or individual can now use and modify the platform’s underlying source code “for any purpose”. Symbian has shipped in more than 330m mobile phones, the foundation says. It believes the move will attract new developers to work on the system and help speed up the pace of improvements.
“This is the largest open source migration effort ever,” Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation told BBC News.
“It will increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform.”
Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester research, said the move was about Symbian “transitioning from one business model to another” as well as trying to gain “momentum and mindshare” for software that had been overshadowed by the release of Apple’s iPhone and Google Android operating system.
Note that the operating system name is now just Symbian. Symbian OS refers to old proprietary Symbian.
We dont have to wait much to see chinese fake phones with real symbial.LOL
I was thinking ,are we’ll be able to move to upper symbian now ?
uhm…nokia with maemo and samsung with bada…no space for me for symbian. italian:….http://bit.ly/acz3ek
yepie symbian opensource xD
does this mean that we can have custom roms for nokia phones? like 5800 or 5530? that would be great, and the ability to upgrade to every symbian version
S2^and S3^ is opensource
i think that make it easier for modders to hack the phones
and we will start seeing chinease phones with the original symbian firmware and may be better
@sobhi – if it’s OPEN SOURCE, it means the normal users will have access to the source code of the operating system so there is no need for anybody to try and hack that. It’s already ‘hacked’ if you please. It’s like you would try to crack a freeware application. If it’s freeware, why would you do that? Hope you got the point. But, yeah, you are right, since the Symbian is now ‘opened’ to anyone, we might see chinese fakes running the real Symbian and since they are continuously perfecting their cloning technique, we might not be able to tell the difference between the original, and the copy.
Let’s just hope that this encourages more developers to enhance the Symbian platform.
It’s possible that Symbian^3 could make it on to current phones like the 5800XM and N97. Let’s hope so.