Today we finally learned what that countdown was all about – the Symbian operating system is, as of today, fully open sourced. This is a major announcement, as it means that any company or individual can take the Symbian platform and make it whatever they want, for any device – be it a smartphone, netbook, tablet, whatever. It’s really a major deal, for a few reasons:
1. First and foremost, the move to entirely open source the Symbian operating system has happened 4 months earlier than originally planned. If the Symbian Foundation continues to accomplish its goals with months to spare, it obviously stands a better chance of becoming more competitive with other platforms such as Android and iPhone much quicker. Also, being able to accomplish this specific goal so far ahead of schedule bodes well for other daunting tasks at hand, such as rewriting the user interface and updating some of the more core functions.
2. Second, as part of the announcement, Lee Williams stated that another goal is to get more folks involved with the development. A complaint that I often hear is that while Nokia no longer officially owns Symbian (they’re merely a founding member, alongside other major companies like Samsung and Texas Instruments), they still contribute the majority of the code, and therefore still control too much of the development. Williams stated that by 2011, the goal is to have Nokia contributing no more than 50% of the development work.
The goal there isn’t so much to push Nokia out as it is to make room for others to come in. Other companies will have fresh ideas and capabilities, as shown by the different homescreens that Samsung and Sony Ericsson use on their Symbian-powered smartphones. That’s only the beginning, too.
3. Now that Symbian is open source, it should be much easier for developers to do some really cool things with it. For starters, they now have full access to all of the system, to see how things work and properly write their apps without having to navigate around a bunch of intellectual property roadblocks. Also, if they see something they can improve, they now have the ability, no matter what it is.
You might be saying, ‘but I thought Android was open source, too?‘. According to Lee Williams, only about 1/3 of the Android platform is open – the rest is closed off or proprietary. With Symbian being 100% open, developers have much more freedom and abilities.
For consumers, this announcement honestly doesn’t mean much of anything, immediately. It doesn’t mean you can instantly do all sorts of new things with your existing Symbian-powered smartphone, or that you’ll be able to update it to do so. However, what it does mean is that the Symbian Foundation is working incredibly hard and making awesome progress on its goals to revamp to compete with the other top-of-mind platforms such as Android and iPhone. It also means that you might begin to see Symbian powering other devices soon – such as netbooks, smartbooks, GPS units, tablets, pretty much anything. This move will also likely be more significant as we move towards the end of 2010, as that’s probably the first time you’ll see any devices that take advantage of this new openness.
In the meantime, we want to extend a big congratulations to everyone working so hard at Symbian Foundation – great job achieving your goals a few months early, and keep up the hard work.
