The Symbian Foundation has announced its completion of the open-sourcing of the Symbian Platform with the release of Symbian 3.
The Symbian Foundation has announced its completion of the open-sourcing of the Symbian Platform with the release of Symbian 3.
On Feb. 4, Symbian Foundation officials said the organization had
successfully completed the open-source release of the source code for
the Symbian Platform, which has become the world's most widely used
smartphone operating system.
Indeed, the Symbian Platform, which has been developed over 10 years
and has shipped in more than 330 million devices around the world, is
now completely open and the source code is available for free under the
EPL (Eclipse Public License).
Initially, the foundation projected that its effort to open-source
the Symbian Platform would take until June of 2010, but the team was
able to beat that mark by four months.
"We are pleased to see the release of such a significant code
contribution under the Eclipse Public License," said Mike Milinkovich,
executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a statement. "The rate
at which the Symbian Foundation has worked to make its platform fully
open has been very impressive."
In an interview with eWEEK about the move, Larry Berkin, director of
Global Alliances at the Symbian Foundation, said he believes the effort
to open-source the Symbian source code was the biggest open-source
migration project ever.
Berkin said any individual or organization can now take, use and
modify the code for any purpose, whether for a mobile device or for
something else entirely.
Ultimately, Berkin said this strategic move provides the Symbian
ecosystem with greater potential for innovation, faster time-to-market
and the opportunity to develop on the platform for free. Symbian's
commitment to openness also includes transparency in future plans,
including the publication of the platform roadmap and planned features
up to and including 2011. The Symbian Foundation already is at work on
Symbian 4, the next major version of the platform, and has begun
sharing the road map for that, Berkin said.
However, analysts note that Symbian will face increasing competition
from the likes of Apple, Google's Android, Palm, Microsoft and Research
In Motion. In fact, IDC predicts that the Android platform will move
into second place in the market behind Symbian by 2013.
In a statement, Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation,
said: "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. When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target
of completing the open-source release of the platform by mid-2010 and
it's because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our
staff and our member companies that we've reached it well ahead of
schedule."
"It's ahead of schedule and that can be attested to the open forum,"
said Berkin of the development process the Symbian Foundation has
adopted.
"It's increasingly important for smartphone platforms to offer
developers something unique," said John Delaney, an analyst with IDC.
"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."
Despite maintaining a leadership position in terms of smartphone
platform market share, the Symbian Platform has not been as successful
in the United States as it has been in the rest of the world,
particularly in emerging markets. However, the foundation is working to
change that.
Berkin acknowledged that that have been some missteps earlier in the
efforts to tap the U.S. market, but that the foundation sees the United
States as a major opportunity. Additionally, "The U.S. is a focus for a
lot of our partners," he said.
In a statement, Peter Ropke, senior vice president of Devices
R&D at Nokia, said: "Nokia congratulates the Symbian Foundation on
the completion of its platform migration to full open source well ahead
of schedule - a significant milestone for the Symbian platform, the
foundation and the entire mobile industry. With this achievement, the
world's most popular smartphone platform is available in its entirety
for developers around the world to innovate on and contribute to,
enabling new opportunities for engagement and monetization. For Nokia,
this truly open platform environment brings the promise of exciting new
user experiences for our Symbian-based smartphones."
All 108 packages containing the source code of the Symbian platform can now be downloaded from Symbian's developer Website under the terms of the EPL and other open-source licenses.
Also available for download are the development kits for creating
applications, known as the Symbian Developer Kit, and the kit for
mobile devices, known as the Product Development Kit. These kits are
compatible with Symbian 3, the very latest version of the platform,
which is now fully open source and will be feature complete during the
first quarter of 2010.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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