Symbian Foundation: towards unification and the opening
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By acquiring all the shares of Symbian, Nokia enables the creation of the Symbian Foundation, an initiative to unify all variations of the platform into a single system and open, able to fight against better competition.
These are major reorganization maneuvers in the universe Symbian. Anxious to maintain its leadership, its representatives, primarily Nokia, Symbian launch Foundation, a group of industrialists open to all to make a Symbian platform unified open and free of royalties with a common development environment to all.
Currently, Symbian is divided into several elements: Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and POP (S) (used in Japan) that meet the needs of different markets, but each with its ecosystem. Before the rise of competing platforms, the hour is to unite all these components.
That is why Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, but AT & T, LG, Samsung, ST Microelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone will participate in the creation of the Symbian Foundation, in which everyone will share its resources to create a mobile operating system common open and free rights for its members.
Nokia architect, actor and contributor to the Symbian Foundation
With this in mind, Nokia, the principal shareholder of Symbian, will buy back the shares of other contributors (or 52%, representing 264 million euros) and share with the foundation’s resources on Symbian OS and S60 interface. For their part, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, holding equal shares of UIQ, will share this resource with other members, while DoCoMo will do likewise with POP (S).
This package will set up a unified platform with a common user interface, that members agree to improve. The aim is to provide a complete open source system by two years (2010) licensed 1.0 EPL (Eclipse Public License).
The Symbian Foundation will formally start its activities from the first half of 2009 with an initial offer of mobile resources open source and a first catalogue of using the terminals. The platform will remain compatible with current versions, Symbian OS v9 and S60 3rd Edition interface, and therefore with corresponding services and applications.
The world therefore Symbian exchange model to adapt to the constraints of new players, including Linux Mobile, which is preparing to land in force. Using a similar development model, its players hope to retain a share of their comfortable advance (over 200 million terminals, a market share of over 60%) while using the same weapons that are the strength of Linux Mobile: joint development and open sharing of resources, contributions.