In a bizarre twist worthy of the SAW franchise, the Symbian OS for mobiles has just gone open source, effectively giving away billions of dollars worth of code… for absolutely nothing.
For those out of the loop, open source software is basically all the code inside a complicated operating system or program being available free to everyone, allowing developers to create their own versions and changes.
Why have Symbian made this ask? Well, The Symbian Foundation wants to attract more developers to the system and speed up development of add-ons and new applications, resulting in more exposure of their product to the market.
It makes sense, as the more people using Symbian, the more they will expand their influence against other systems, because, despite being the world’s most popular phone OS, Symbian is relatively unheard of when compared to the iPhone OS and Android by Google.
According to Symbian executives, the move was also to help outside developers navigate intellectual property problems, increase security in general and ease pressure on current developers Nokia, who will down their development 50% due to the change.
The source code can be downloaded from the Nokia website, so get your developing on… who knows, if you’re any good you could be the proud owner of the next big thing in the mobile industry!
Source: BBC
Popularity: 50% [?]
Tags: Ericsson, nokia, Open, Operating, OS, Sony, Source, Syastem, symbian
