Symbian offer billions of code for free!
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010The world’s most popular smartphone operating system Symbian, are giving away ‘billions of dollars’ worth of code away for free.
Back in 2008 Symbian announced that they would make their code open source, this move has now been completed. So what does this mean? It allows any organisation or individual to use and modify the platform’s underlying source code “for any purpose”.
Symbian have managed to ship more than 330m mobile phones, the foundation says.
“This is the largest open source migration effort ever,” Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation.
“It will increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform.”
The principal analyst at Forrester research, Ian Fogg, said the move was about Symbian “transitioning from one business model to another” as well as trying to gain “momentum and mindshare” intended for software that had been overshadowed by the release of Apple’s iPhone and Google Android operating system.
With smartphones set to be the phones of 2010, all mobile phone manufacturers are getting in on the act. The Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia bought the Symbian software back in 2008, which helped them to establish the non-profit foundations of symbian.
The range of symbian has spread throughout the manufacturing field, including AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.
