Finnish phone-maker Nokia has announced plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian and direct the Symbian mobile platform towards becoming open-source, establishing the Symbian Foundation with partnered hardware manufacturers.
It will then contribute the software to the non-profit Symbian Foundation established with other major players in the market, such as AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectonics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone, to accelerate the development of the platform.
Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo have also announced their intent to contribute their UIQ and MOAP(S) assets to the foundation.
The foundation has committed to move the platform toward open source in the next two years and the codes will be available to its members under a royalty-free licence. The foundation is expected to start operating during the first half of 2009.
Are all these a direct response to Google's Open Handset Alliance? What do you think? Share your thoughts in Talkback or post your comments in the forum.
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Dean
26/06/2008 08:55 AM
"available to its members under a royalty-free licence"? So what about non-members? Doesn't sound very "open" to me...
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