As promised, Nokia is making the latest version of the Symbian platform source code available to its platform development partners.
The company long touted its intent to deliver the entirety of its open-source operating system environment to the community. And now nearly all of the source code has been uploaded to collab.symbian.nokia.com, and the few remaining source files, tools and documents will be uploaded over the next few weeks, according to a post on the Forum Nokia site.
Meanwhile, in a post on Nokia’s Symbian Blog entitled “We are Open!,” Petra Soderling, Nokia’s head of open source for Symbian smartphones, said, “We are excited about the completion of the transfer period, during which code delivery from the Symbian Foundation has now been replaced by an open and direct model from Nokia.”
Moreover, added Soderling: “As Nokia announced in February, our plan is for Windows Phone to be our primary smartphone strategy. While Nokia and Microsoft are working on a definitive agreement between the two companies and we have begun working on product collaboration, Nokia plans to ship at least 150 million Symbian smartphones and to continue to deliver innovation and software updates to the platform. To achieve all of this, we need the collaboration with our platform development partners and continue to value an open way of working.”
Soderling also reiterated that Nokia will no longer refer to official releases as “Symbian 3” or “Symbian 4,” but will deliver continuous evolution of the platform to partners and customers. “In line with this approach we are not delivering software builds, but do offer build tools through this Website, and a SDK [Software Development Kit] through Forum Nokia.”
In October 2010, Nokia decided to focus on Qt as the sole application development framework for the Symbian and MeeGo platforms. Nokia also announced its intent to support HTML5 for development of Web content and applications for both Symbian and MeeGo platforms.
“We have been working hard to turn most Symbian Foundation era materials into the new framework,” Soderling said.