Symbian transformation to Open will take time

Rating: Legal and technical hurdles to overcome

The momentous news that Nokia intends to help transform Symbian into an open source OS has taken most observers – and plenty of affected employees, too – completely by surprise.
However, the open source code for the Symbian Foundation won’t be appearing on user group sites tomorrow.

It’s going to take time – probably about twelve months - for the code to be made totally public, although members of the actual Foundation itself should get the code way before that.

One reason for this is that legal hurdles with Nokia purchasing the remaining stakes in Symbian held by Sony Ericsson, Ericsson (on its own), Panasonic and Siemens will have to be overcome. That will simply take time. Who’s going to object, though?

The real problem will be trying to turn around seven million lines of code that Symbian takes up into something that is free from all copyrights. Not just Symbian owned copyrights, of course.

But the objective is to encourage loads of developers to start working on applications that will run on mobile phones using the Symbian Foundation as the platform.

One aspect that has emerged is that the Symbian Foundation regards itself as truly international. You’ve got NTT DoCoMo from Japan, Vodafone from the UK but with tentacles worldwide, and AT&T from the States.

I think the objective here is to paint Goggle and Android as very much a North American initiative.

Perhaps the bravest observer to date has been Morgan Gillis, the executive director of  the LiMo Foundation which is a Linux based initiative. He quite rightly points out that, “Openness in governance and development is something which LiMo has backed since 2007.”

LiMo sees the Symbian move as crystallising the mobile industry towards fewer mobile operating systems. I’m sure that Nokia has a lower number than that in mind.

Related News:

1. Symbian will go Open Source
2. EMCC Software Anticipates Symbian Foundation Will Stimulate Greater Industry Growth
3. 9 Further Members for Symbian Foundation, 150 register interest
4. Nokia says Open Source developers need a business lesson
5. Nokia to acquire Symbian Limited to enable evolution of the leading open mobile platform