Symbian, the company behind the popular proprietary mobile/embedded operating system of the same name, just turned 10, but it won’t see its next birthday. Nokia, which had long owned a substantial portion of Symbian, announced today that it would be buying the rest of the company, 52% for about 264 million Euros, or approximately $410 million. In addition to purchasing Symbian, Nokia says it will be open-sourcing the Symbian operating system.
In a press call from London, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said that Nokia will place the code in the hands of a new vendor-neutral organization: The Symbian Foundation. This isn’t just a nod toward working with an open source development community. Besides Nokia, organizations such as AT&T, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Texas Instruments, and more than a dozen other companies are investing in the new open Symbian.
On the call, Kallasvuo said, “This is a significant milestone in our software strategy. Symbian is already the leading open platform for mobile devices. Through this acquisition and the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, it will undisputedly be the most attractive platform for mobile innovation. This will drive the development of new and compelling Web-enabled applications to delight a new generation of consumers.”
According to sources at Nokia, code will be released to the public for the first time in either the last quarter of 2008 or the first quarter of 2009. All of Symbian OS and its development tools will be made available by 2010. At this time, Nokia and its Symbian Foundation allies plans on releasing the program under the Eclipse Public License 1.0.
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