Today the Symbian Foundation announced that they have finally made their entire Symbian operating system source code available to everyone, completely free of charge, under the EPL (Eclipse Public License).
This release has been a cornerstone of the Symbian Foundation’s business strategy, and comes four months ahead of schedule.
It is hoped that by moving to an open source model, developers will get involved, inspire a community, and the speed of innovation around the Symbian ecosystem will increase proportionately.
So what will this mean to me as a consumer? Well essentially it means that any hardware manufacturer can download the code, and build a Symbian device. Chances are that this scenario won’t really come to fruition in the short term as many of the large scale manufacturers who were interested have already joined the foundation.
What you should see though, is a quicker development of the OS to bring it up to speed with it’s competitiors, as in some areas Symbian has fallen behind somewhat.
This release is no small mean feat by any standards, and there is lots of extra reading if you are so inclined. The announcement is HERE, the press release is HERE and the relevant post on the Symbian Blog is HERE. Or, if you are feeling really brave, the code is available for download HERE.
What do hope to see come out of this announcement? Are you a developer interested in taking up arms? Let us know in the comments, or shoot me an email steve@thenokianetwork.com
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