Last week, four months ahead of schedule, the source code for the Symbian platform was made open source. This was the largest transition ever of proprietary software to open source.
The Symbian platform, which has now been in development for over ten years, has shipped in more than 330 million devices, making it the most-installed mobile phone operating system in the world.
With the growing development from Android and the iPhone, its no surprise that Symbian has gone OS, although owners Nokia claim that this was always the intention, even before Android existed. Android was the first ever mobile phone platform to be made open source, and this has contributed somewhat to its success.
Once software/code is released as open source, it means it is available for all programmers to develop. This leads to better opportunity for innovation and also gives a greater deal of flexibility to manufacturers, meaning they are more likely to use software on their devices if they can tweak it as they please. Symbian has also committed complete transparency in future plans, including the publication of the platform roadmap and planned features up to and including 2011. Anyone can now influence the roadmap and contribute new features.
The next release of Symbian should give us a good indication as to whether or not they can still be counted in the battle of the Operating Systems.
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