Symbian OS goes open source

Still the largest operating system in terms of smartphones, the Symbian Foundation has reorganised itself for the new world of Android, iPhone, Maemo, Brew, Windows Mobile and Linux by freely releasing all its 108 packages under the open source licence.

Shipped in more than 330 million devices, the technology been in development for more than 10 years.

Also available is the Symbian Developer Kit and the Product Development Kit, both of which are compatible with Symbian^3, the latest version of the platform, which is also fully open source and will be feature complete during Q1 2010.

Looking to the future

And as part of the transition, the Symbian Foundation has revealed its platform roadmap and planned features up to and including 2011, so anyone can influence the roadmap and contribute new features.

""The development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry, and rapid innovation on a global scale will be the result," said Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation.

"When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open source release of the platform by mid-2010 and it's because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we've reached it well ahead of schedule."

You can download the source code from tiny.symbian.org/open.

More details about the Symbian Foundation can be found at Symbian.org.

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