Opener than thou
Mobile phone giant Nokia bought the half of Symbian it didn't already own in the middle of 2008, with the aim of making the operating system completely open source within two years. Today, the Symbian Foundation announced it has achieved that aim four months ahead of schedule.
This transition from proprietary to open source code is apparently the largest in software history. The code is now available for programmers to muck about with as they see fit. Symbian will also publish a product roadmap all the way thorough to 2011.
"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," said Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation.
IDC analyst, John Delaney added: "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."
You can supposedly download all the code here, but we can't see anything yet. There will also be, not only software development kits, but product development kits for creating mobile devices.
Symbian now joins Google's Android as an open source operating system designed primarily for smartphones. We would be interested to hear from the HEXUS.community about how the two platforms compare. Symbian is making a big noise about being truly open, is Android less so?
