Thursday, February 4, 2010

Symbian is free and open-source

This June 24, 2008 Nokia has announced the acquisition of British company Symbian, causing the eponymous operating system for smartphones. At the same time, the Symbian Foundation was created with the support of operators like AT & T, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone, or creators of mobile chips such as Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics. Today nearly 200 telecom players have joined the foundation.

And nearly 12 years after the creation of Symbian is a first version of open-source and free system that will be published in the day, four months ahead of schedule originally planned. Result: all manufacturers wanting to use a Symbian phone can benefit without payment of any license. According to Lee Williams, executive director of the foundation based in London, he is converting the largest proprietary software to an open-source solution.

The integrated system Symbian is now over 330 million mobile phones in the world. The opening its source code is expected to increase the terminal equipped with this OS mobile smartphones to tablet, as proposed including Google with its Android system. But according to Lee Williams, the mobile system from Google is not truly "open".

"Nearly one third of the source code for Android is open. No more. And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary, "says he. In addition, the Symbian system gives greater visibility of progress to be proposed in the coming months. "We are the only ones to engage in development until 2011. And everyone can influence the roadmap and contribute to new features, "says finally.

Symbian is the ^ 3 should be offered as open-source version. The first terminal operator must emerge from summer 2010. Lee Williams we stated at the end of last year that "Symbian and Symbian 3 ^ ^ 4 will offer 664 new features. The Symbian system per se has already 40 to 50 million lines of code. All are now available under open-source license.

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