This is a great news. Symbian already leads the mobile OS market at 60% share, and making it Open Source and Royalty Free license will help it grow even faster.
Nokia is also going to buy Symbian Ltd. and contribute it to new Symbian Foundation, while Sony Erricson and NTT DoCoMo are also going to contribute to foundation.
Later in 2009, we will have a new Symbian OS version which will integrate all the features of S60 and UIQ into one OS. So, Adobe’s Open Screen and Open Source Symbian would be real good platform to build cool experiences.
Read more at Symbian Foundation
Also checkout the recording of the webcast.
// chall3ng3r //
I believe you have mixed up a few things: Symbian is NOT S60 or UIQ, it is the underlying OS that provide the basic services and the interface to hardware. While open sourcing it it is certainly a good move (but we still need to understand why and who’s going to buy into it), without a thick layer of software that implement the User Interface you can’t do much with Symbian itself. Developing such UI is very expensive and requires huge investment, without considering how old, clumsy and difficult Symbian is, being still based on the very old EPOC OS of 15 years ago. UIQ (owned by Sony Ericsson) has not announced any kind of open sourcing and Open Screen is only an initiative to make FlashLite player avaiable to for free to OEM without paying any license, it is nothing to do with open source. Mobile Linux has been open source for years, but still have to see any signficant interface built on top of it.
Thanks for your comments,
You are correct about Symbian is the underlaying OS to S60 and UIQ. But if you see the recording of the webcast, Nokia guy announced that Nokia has planned to buy Symbian Ltd later this year, and contribute its resources into Symbian Foundation in 2009.
Similarly, Sony Erricson and NTT DoCoMo will also contributing thier parts of work on Symbian OS in the foundation to build one unified mobile OS. The important thing is current v9.x applications will continue to work.
Yes, Open Screen project is nothing to do with this announcement, but as I’m a Flash Lite developer. Adobe’s Open Screen initiative and this annoucment is big news for me, as most of the Flash Lite applications developed today are for Symbian S60 phones. More companies will be adopting Symbian OS and Flash Lite technology, good for us :)
// chall3ng3r //