Symbian has annouced that it has completed the migration of its entire platform to open source. The move, which was completed four months ahead of schedule, now makes billions of dollars of code available to developers for free.

The plan to make Symbian open source was first announced back in 2008 when Nokia acquired the company. It was an apparent response to Google’s entrance into the smartphone market with its own open source platform, Android. In the intervening couple of years Symbian has been losing mindshare, if not market share, to rival smartphone platforms, and they will be hoping this move ushers in a new generation of support and development for the platform.

Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation, commented: “The development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry, and rapid innovation on a global scale will be the result. When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open source release of the platform by mid-2010 and it’s because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we’ve reached it well ahead of schedule.”

Symbian will also be hoping it can attract new licensees to the operating system, although will be hindered by having a brand that is almost anonymous in the wider world, in stark constrast to the instantly recognisable Google name. In addition, the dominance of Nokia would have to be dealt with by new licensees, and their package, now including the free turn-by-turn navigation through Ovi Maps, is pretty formidable.

One of the few current licensees is Sony Ericsson. Their Head of Software Patrik Olsson commented: “As a founder member of the Symbian Foundation, Sony Ericsson is very pleased that the Symbian source code is now fully open and available to all for free. We believe this will create new innovation on the platform and bring additional benefits to consumers.

“As a company that strongly believes in openness and the power of partnerships, the success and speed of the Symbian Foundation’s transition from proprietary code to open source illustrates what we as an industry can achieve when we work together.”

All 108 packages containing the source code of the Symbian platform can now be downloaded from Symbian’s developer web site, under the terms of the Eclipse Public License and other open source licenses.

Also available for download are the complete development kits for creating applications (the Symbian Developer Kit) and mobile devices (the Product Development Kit). These kits are compatible with Symbian^3, the very latest version of the platform, which is now fully open source and will be “feature complete” during Q1 of this year.

Popularity: 1% [?]