2008 Year in Review: Symbian goes open-source

Jaws dropped when in late June Nokia made the surprise announcement it would acquire the remaining shares of mobile software licensing company Symbian Limited and team with Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo to pool the Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP technologies for the purpose of creating a single open mobile software platform. With other industry bigwigs they also established the Symbian Foundation, a non-profit initiative dedicated to accelerating the availability of new services and mobile experiences. Nokia agreed contribute all of its shares in Symbian as well as the Symbian and S60 software to the foundation, with Sony Ericsson and Motorola committing to hand over UIQ and DoCoMo contributing its MOAP assets. The end result: A unified platform with a common UI framework available to all foundation members under a royalty-free license, with the first devices based on the Symbian Foundation code expected to arrive in 2010. While Nokia's Symbian bombshell is no doubt a reaction to the ... (link)