Symbian Operating System now open source

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/symbian-operating-system-now-open-source-and-free/

by omfut • 16 years ago

85 31 16 years ago

lanstein2• 16 years ago

From the 'too little, too late' department...

jbm• 16 years ago

To gain market share, maybe; but there are an insane number of devices running Symbian. This might allow us to do some interesting tinkering.

Speaking of Symbian - I remember an entire floor at Fujitsu's building in Musashi Kosugi in Kawasaki was completely locked down; no in or out without special clearance. That entire section was devoted to coding in Symbian, and they had some proprietary information about the OS from Nokia about the system.

lanstein2• 16 years ago

This move may well be more relevant to non-US-centric development, especially markets like Finland.

scw• 16 years ago

I agree, it reminds me of Netscape's decision to spin off their code base into open-source Mozilla. Arguably the web benefited greatly from this decision, but at the time it produced a four year delay in a new version at a time Microsoft was rapidly releasing new versions of IE: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

shmichael• 16 years ago

Nokia still has 3 times more smartphones in the market than Apple, apparently.

http://latestgeeknews.blogspot.com/2010/02/nokia-sorry-apple...

munctional4• 16 years ago

The US market, while high in visibility, is largely irrelevant in the global scope. Nokia has a massive install base.

jdietrich• 16 years ago

Nonsense. It might be 'too little, too late' to take on the iPhone, but it's timed perfectly for the real market for mobile phones. It's easy to forget that there are an estimated four billion GSM subscribers worldwide, most of whom neither know nor care about Android or the iPhone.

The global mobile OS market is currently dominated by Nucleus, OSE and Series 40 - these three platforms have a combined market share of 90%.

For Series 40 users, the obvious upgrade path is Series 60 - of course Nokia will lose many of these customers, but they will keep many more.

That leaves us with the myriad manufacturers using Nucleus and OSE. These manufacturers, many of them completely unknown in the west, are producing featurephones for customers who are highly price sensitive and are staggeringly fickle and fashion-led.

When looking for an upgrade path to a full smartphone OS, the main concern of these manufacturers will be cost - of implementation and of Bill of Materials. Symbian has clear advantages over other smartphone platforms in this respect, being royalty-free and having significantly lower hardware requirements than Android. An open code base will open the door to these Chinese manufacturers and their dizzying diversity of hardware and software designs.

I reckon that the Symbian Foundation has played an absolute blinder here - it may have lost North America, but it still has a dominant position in EMEA and has set itself up perfectly to launch an aggressive assault on BRIC.

fauigerzigerk• 16 years ago

What you say sounds reasonable on the face of it, but there's one piece missing. Do these manufacturers believe that Symbian can keep up with the pace of new hardware designs and software fashions or that it even survives?

Now, I'm anything but an expert on Symbian, but my general impression was that Symbian has been falling behind and Nokia has been suffering financially partly because of that.

If I was a Chinese handset manufacturer I would ask myself who I can trust more to stick to its platform and subsidise further development, Google or Nokia (or even Microsoft if they manage to pull off a comeback).

Nokia has started to make high-end Linux based phones as well. Why would they do that if they believe in Symbian? And why would Nokia, a handset manufacturer itself, subsidise an OS that other handset manufacturers are successfully using?

There are too many unanswered questions around Symbian I think.

kqr2• 16 years ago

From the article:

About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more,” says Williams. “And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary.”

Can anyone with more Android experience comment on this? What is the 2/3 that has been kept proprietary?

hypermatt• 16 years ago

You can download builds of the Android operating system and fully rebuild your whole phone from source, so that seems odd to me also.

there• 16 years ago

which don't contain the proprietary apps from google like maps, gtalk, app market, and youtube.

in addition, a number of android phones currently on the market have closed-source hardware drivers for things like their wireless radios.

joeyo• 16 years ago

This seems completely backwards to me. The kernel of course is open, with the possible exception of some specific hardware drivers for specific phones (Wifi and perhaps GPS). The virtual machine (dalvik) and development environment are both open. The closed parts are at the apps level: Gmail, Gmaps, Marketplace, and so on.

cdibona• 16 years ago

We have a few apps that aren't open source, and they have an entire operating system that hasn't shipped as open source yet. See how that works?

This guy is a joker.

joe_the_user2• 16 years ago

I hope this is good sign.

I'm developing a simple-but-powerful desktop QT app that I hope to port to symbian and Android at a later point.

As an application framework, QT (developed by Nokia) rocks and it would be nice to have it target lots of open platforms.

munctional4• 16 years ago

I don't know if it's fair to say that Qt was developed by Nokia. Nokia acquired Trolltech last year (who were the developers of it).

joe_the_user2• 16 years ago

Uh, I meant; Nokia currently develops Qt; Qt as it currently stands is developed by Nokia. Qt was developed by developed by Trolltech. Nokia didn't originally develop Qt. I didn't say "was developed by"... Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo ... English ... has a lot tense strangeness...

pavlov2• 16 years ago

The article says that Symbian powers most of Nokia's phones, but that's not correct. AFAIK, Symbian is on about 20% of Nokia's offerings, with the rest running their closed dumbphone operating systems (Series 30/40).

whyleyc• 16 years ago

More in-depth analysis on BBC tech site here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8496263.stm

c00p3r2• 16 years ago

No hype, no hacker's fame, just a boring and outdated stuff.

c00p3r2• 16 years ago

to dear down-voters: what is the reason to develop on really crappy platform for outdated devices with 128x128 screens which people throw away and buy new once a year?

rbanffy• 16 years ago

If an operating system falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Symbian Operating System now open source

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