Nokia outlines plans to take Symbian to "the next level"
Published: 21 October, 2008
This week sees the Symbian Smartphone Show in London, where Nokia took the stage to clarify some points about the transition of the Symbian operating system to an open source foundation. David Rivas, VP of Series 60 products and technology, said open source was essential "to take the business of handsets and software development to the next level", despite the commercial risks of the transition process.
The Symbian Foundation will take a phased approach, as sketchily outlined earlier this year when Nokia acquired full control of Symbian from its handset co-shareholders and announced its open plan, a move widely seen as a masterstroke against the challenge from Google.
The first phase, to occur early next year, will be to make the sourcecode of Symbian OS and Nokia's software/user interface platform Series 60 available 'free' to all Foundation members. During that phase, members (who pay $1,500 to join), can use the Foundation's intellectual property assets, but not redistribute them. By the first half of 2010, the Symbian Foundation will be ready to go fully open source.
Rivas stressed that open source decisions were "not a social experiment" but needed to be driven by hard commercial factors as much as proprietary product plans. "The development priorities will be driven by the Foundation members, and they are driven by business decisions of everyone involved," he told journalists.
Symbian will use the Eclipse open source licensing model, Eclipse Public License, which Nokia claims sits as a "perfect, business friendly solution" midway between the contrasting models of the main open processes, GNU General Public License and Apache (the latter used by Google for Android).
Meanwhile, despite its commitment to Symbian and the huge degree of influence it will still hold over the open platform, Nokia is pursuing an open platform strategy too and knows that, for its ambitions as a web services provider to succeed, it must support applications for many mobile OSs. Rivas said the Qt multi-platform toolset, acquired last year with Trolltech, will be a key asset in this strategy.
More NOKIA News
More SYMBIAN News
More HANDSET News
COMMENTS
Carrier Broadband Performance: Africa & Middle East
Carriers are using mobile broadband as their weapon of choice in the fight against the commoditization of voice and falling ARPU. This...
Voice over LTE: Market Analysis and Forecasts
VoLTE offer unique advantages in lowering a carrier's voice infrastructure economics and promises to improve voice quality, device...
Satellite Phones: Will Dual Mode Help the Phoenix Rise from the Ashes?
Satellite phones have followed an arduous path since their much-hyped launch more than a decade ago. The hype was followed by an e...
