Symbian opens up its source code, available now for your downloading pleasure

By on Feb 4, 2010 at 5:29 PM
News February 4, 2010

symbian-open-source

It is official. The Symbian Foundation has released Symbian as an open source product today, four months ahead of its scheduled mid-2010 completion date. As with other open source projects, the move will allow developers to modify and contribute to the source code in hopes of improving the overall quality and hastening the development of the operating system. An open source Symbian can also be installed on any compatible device for free which should help to further expand Symbian’s reach and solidify Symbian’s position as the dominant mobile OS worldwide. Beating Android to the punch, Symbian will publish its platform roadmap and planned features up to 2011, an outline which the Symbian Foundation notes can be modified and expanded based upon developer contributions to the mobile OS. The full Symbian source code is available for download now at Symbian’s developer website.

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  • Dave

    Cool!!

  • jcutner

    dibs on making a symbian app store, and taking 90% of the profits!

  • Frogford Ryder

    What percent of phones actually still run this OS anyway? Isn’t this kinda like Amiga finally making its Workbench available as open source?

    • TK

      My Amiga still runs. My kids think it’s cool, but “big and slow”.

    • http://www.maemo-freak.com christexaport

      almost 50% of all smartphones sold each year run Symbian, sleepyhead…

  • http://www.maemo-freak.com christexaport

    Moving along ahead of schedule…

    Nice seeing Symbian purring along. Wait until winter when Symbian^4 will really invade the US, with Maemo 6 running the same apps plus the various Linux app ports alongside their already great community repositories of apps. Nokia will finally be a real competitor in the US, and should give WinMo and WebOS a scare, and rob RIM, Android, and Apple of sales. I can’t wait for all the naysayers of the past 3 years doubting the reorganization and revamping of Symbian by Nokia. Now prepare for the domination to recommence…

    • me too

      I sure hope so. I would love a nice Nokia / Symbian or Maemo combo that’s on all of the carriers, not just the GSM’s mostly. I’m on Sprint now after years with ATT.

  • Eric

    Frogford Ryder, youre kidding, right?

    symbian os is on more phones than any other os out there. i cant believe you are that in the dark.

  • Nokia N900

    That’s great, I guess..

    • Nokia N900

      As long as they don’t give away the secrets to Maemo!

      • http://www.maemo-freak.com christexaport

        almost 50% of all smartphones sold each year run Symbian, sleepyhead… And Maemo Ned yman to be successful. Symbian will run all Maemo apps made with the official app toolkit, Qt, which they will share. So any dev wanting to cover Symbian, Maemo, WinMo, Windows 7, Mac OSX, Linux, and Unix in one swoop would be wise to work with Symbian and Qt.

  • New York User

    This approach didn’t work out too well for Sun.

    • hary

      How did it work out for Android, Linux, OpenOffice.

  • Ash

    does this mean my ngage qd can get some sort of use?

  • Ali

    Symbian OS is dead. Nokia has given up on it completely and so have SE and Samsung [ the only other manufacturers that were tinkering with it. I have to admit I it was very cool and I loved my s60 phone 6600, n73,n95,n82 etc but its world wide dominance will come to an end. Sometime this before the end of this year Android will emerge as the dominant mobile OS. Soon afterwards, the Skynet will become self aware and Judgement day will begin.

  • Sir Bradley

    They are just trying to get free developers by open sourcing it. Not going to happen.

  • http://donawole.blogspot.com Clement Onawole

    Now they realized what Android has been achieving in shorter time of existence being open…too late, the world seems to have gone beyond symbian

  • http://www.maemo-freak.com christexaport

    Dude, Android isn’t really open except to the manufacturers. Maemo and Symbian are REALLY open. And Nokia has been planning this for three years! Not to combat Google…

    And Symbian isn’t dead as long as its outselling Android, Blackberry, and iPhone OSes combined. S60 is dead, but that’s exactly what we wanted. The new Direct UI is just months away…

  • nada

    ineed code word symbian c++ please

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