Symbian = Open
Symbian OS is open source now
Today is a great day for the open source community. On February 4, 2010, 4 months ahead of schedule, Symbian Foundation has completed the open source release of the source code for the world’s most widely-used smartphone platform Symbian OS.
Symbian Foundation is hoping to get some attention from the open source community to develop the platform.
The source code Licensed under the EPL (Eclipse Public License).
So what does it means that Symbian OS is open source, except it will be free and you can reach the source code. In short term it will not affect the quality of the OS but it will rise the number of symbian devices out there, since it is free of charge. However in mid and long term the OS will have some attraction of the open source community developers (Thats the idea anyways) so the quality and pace of development will be better too.
Here Nokia’s strategy is very important, since they own Symbian, about encouraging the developers to work on the platform, If Nokia wants to get the attention of the developers, they need to provide the tools and possibly the trainings to make it easy to develop for Symbian.
A simple and fast suggestion that would be fruitful is to make deals with the schools and give some intensive courses that is one week long and for free. So lets see what will happen. All in all this is a great step, but not entirely enough.
Click here to reach Symbian Foundation