Symbian phone operating system goes open source

The group behind the world’s most popular smartphone operating system – Symbian – is giving away “billions of dollars” worth of code for free.

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.

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Tags: android, code open source, Forrester Research, Google, ian fogg, iPhone, mobile phones, operating system, smartphone, source code, symbian os

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 9:48 pm and is filed under BBC, Communications, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.