Nokia Open Sources Symbian

Symbian had been acquired by Nokia years before its downfall. They made a good start by Open Sourcing a part of it with a plan to Open source rest of the code on regular intervals. The strategy tended to take a new direction with the arrival of Android, iPhone which made Nokia panic and run for its OS.

Nokia diverted its plan towards new Open source mobile OS, MeeGo. The strategy had big backing from Intel but it never paved off, and Nokia nearly ditched the future of its own OS. Now that Nokia has moved to Windows Phone 7, Nokia would no longer support existing Symbian OS devices, but would continue to play tits n bits with the code. ITs of course a good time to Open source the whole of project and let innovators from around the globe pitch in.

Nokia is now announcing that the Symbian code has been fully Open sourced and is available at symbian.nokia.com. The transition phase is pretty much in works, but once done collab.symbian.nokia.com will have full documentation & tools available for developers.

The documentation page shows “coming soon” for all but the GIT repository guide. However, any interested and informed parties can always go and contribue to the Symbian Wiki.

According to Nokia’s head of open source, Petra Soderling:

“We have been working hard to turn most Symbian Foundation era materials into the new framework – for example, checking ownerships and use of rights for masses of documents – and are proud to announce that almost all of the source code is now uploaded to collab.symbian.nokia.com. The few remaining source files, tools and documents will be uploaded over the next few weeks.”

The situation surrounding contributing code back to Symbian’s source code. She responded by stating:

“As we committed when the Symbian Foundation announced its plans to ramp down, Nokia is offering Symbian through an alternative, open and direct model for those who wish to use the platform. We encourage potential collaborators to discuss with the package owners at Nokia if they have enhancements that are really useful and they believe could be incorporated into the platform. Currently they can get in touch with us through the ‘Contact us’ function on the website.

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