The operating system that powers 60% of the world's mobile phones will be open source within the next two years.
Executives from Symbian made the surprise announcement at a press conference in London this week, along with senior representatives from mobile handset manufacturers, carriers and service providers.
The multi-vendor consortium company, which oversees the mobile OS, will be acquired by Nokia before the end of this year, after which a non-profit Symbian Foundation will be launched in 2009.
The foundation will oversee a free and open source unified platform made up of the current Symbian, UIQ and MOAP(S) mobile codebases.
"We have a shared vision for setting free mobile software," said Kai Oistamo, executive VP of Nokia. "The foundation will be able to unify the technological assets for the most complete and most advanced developer and user experience. We will be leveraging the millions of developers around the world rather than just the ones in-house and that will help us to sell more phones and solutions."
Symbian, which powers 200 million handsets around the world, was launched 10 years ago. CEO Nigel Clifford said the best way to celebrate the anniversary was to do it again - but this time open.
"We want to remove barriers to innovation and our customers want things to happen more quickly. This is just the next stage of our journey. Membership of the foundation will be open to all, with source code available free at launch to all members."
Clifford said the current members were committed to moving the platform to open source over the next two years, but that some code clean-up needed to be performed before that could happen.
The move is seen as a response to Google's Android OS for the mobile platform, but also as a recognition that true innovation in development will come from the users rather than the vendors.
The Symbian OS will be licensed using the Eclipse Public Licence.
"We invite the whole mobile ecosystem to join us," said Alain Mutricy, senior VP of Motorola.
Share