Symbian OS Set Free, Now Open Source

February 3, 2010 By Dena Cassella

Symbian has opened itself up to the world--today the mobile OS went open source.

Today, the world’s most popular mobile operating system—Symbian OS—went completely open source, giving away billions of dollars worth of code for free. The Symbian Foundation, which was established by Finnish handset maker Nokia in 2008, decided to make the mobile platform open so that any individual or organization could use it, work on it and modify for whatever they choose.

“The dominant operating system provider out there is Symbian,” says Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, “and now we are offering developers the ability to do so much more.”

Symbian has played a big role in the mobile community and in total has shipped more than 330 million devices worldwide. The Symbian Foundation was established to help start the process of opening up the platform so it may be governed and used freely. The move for Symbian has been completed four months ahead of schedule and as of today it is ready for people to dive in and make use of it.

Showing 2 comments

Nokia moves Symbian to closed licensing at 10:00am 11th April 2011 [...] nail in the coffin for the Symbian development community. Back in February 2010, Symbian proudly launched itself as an open source platform under the Symbian Foundation; the idea was to foster an ecosystem of developers and device makers [...]
Symbian foundation head steps down at 9:43am 20th October 2010 [...] operating systems from the likes of Apple, RIM, and Google. Nokia acquired Symbian in 2008 and set up the open source Symbian Foundation earlier this year, opening up the platform so any developer could use it in their handsets or [...]