Symbian Completes Transition To Open Source 189
Grond writes "Symbian, maker of the the world's most popular mobile operating system, has completed the transition to a completely open platform months ahead of schedule. While the kernel was opened up last year, the entire platform is now open source, primarily under the Eclipse Public License. A FAQ is available with more information about the platform opening."
Adds an anonymous reader, linking to PC Magazine's story on the transition: "By putting Symbian fully in the public domain, the Symbian Foundation is pitting it against Google's Android. Symbian is well known across most of the world, but it's mostly a foreign curiosity in the US, AT&T is the only carrier that currently has a symbian phone in its lineup, the Nokia E71x."
Pet peeve: "public domain" (Score:5, Informative)
Placing code under an open-source license is not the same as putting it in the "public domain". Code under an open source license still has conditions attached to it (even if minimal ones) while code placed in the public domain has no restrictions placed on it of any sort. Code under an open-source license is still copyrighted, but with a permissive license that allows one to do some things normally reserved only for the work's copyright holder. By contrast, a work in the public domain is not covered by copyright law at all.
Re:Still need signed apps though don't I (Score:5, Informative)
If it's so freakin' open please tell me why I still need to have apps signed on my Nokia 6220 classic and will do for the foreseeable future unless I'm willing to try risky hacks.
I'll raise you an anecdote. I just bought a Nokia E63, new and unlocked with a full US warranty for $189 from Newegg, and it's one of the best phones I've ever owned. You simply go to the application manager menu, and for the option that says "Install only signed apps", select "No". It's that simple. I just installed an unsigned FTP client, so now I don't even need Nokia's atrocious PC Suite for syncing.
Re:Too little, too late (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Too little, too late (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know how many millions of phones out there run S60...
About 330 Million worldwide, according to Symbian - out of those, at least 100M were sold in the last 18 months so are likely to still be in use.
Re:Too little, too late (Score:2, Informative)
The massive series of apps and developer support that's growing around Android will probably push Maemo out of the market.
Yes. Because there are no apps for Debian.
Re:AT&T's other phones (Score:4, Informative)
S40 is not based on Symbian.
Hyperbole Fanboys (Score:2, Informative)
Re:http://maemo.org/ (Score:2, Informative)
"From what I have read, Nokia are dropping Symbian from future N series smart phones, so basically this announcement means that they are open sourcing their low end crappy OS which has pretty much failed in the smart phone space."
Symbian has been around for a decade and still controls the plurality (even majority?) of the smartphone market. I wouldn't call that a failure.
So much blah (Score:5, Informative)
I am biased as I work "with it" every day.
It's written in C++ and the syscalls are asynchronous by default (very very nice when you're doing lots of comms). It has a microkernel and an extremely comprehensive api. It's even written in C++. The kernel is actually quite nice.
So *actually* Linux is a dinosaur by comparison if you consider modern-ness to be of any importance.
I don't but and I like linux a lot but Symbian is an operating system that deserves respect and it's dumb to believe that everything has to be done "one true way". The user-level programming experience is not nice due to the great efforts made to fit it onto early phone hardware (since it has been out there long before 600Mhz ARM chips arrived that could shift the weight of Linux or OSX).
But all of that's changing and as a result of pretty gargantuan efforts that few pundits have any appreciation of that this rough diamond is being cut and will dazzle.
Nokia's share is increasing, not decreasing (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure there's much evidence that Nokia are losing any ground? For last quarter of 2009, their sales were up 22%, their profits almost doubled, and their market share increased to 39%; in the "smartphone" market, their share increased from 35% to 40% [bbc.co.uk].
The "big names" you mention are still niche players in the phone market (except perhaps RIM; admittedly they should also worrying about Android, not because of Google phones directly, but because the rest of the phone manufacturers such as Motorola may switch to Android; but Apple are a non-issue here).