The Symbian Foundation has completed the open-source release of its source code for the Symbian platform, which the organization calls the world’s most widely used smart-phone platform. This move, which took the platform from proprietary code to open source over more than 10 years, was completed four months ahead of schedule.

Article Tools

• 

Designers can now take, use, and modify the code for any purpose for free, whether it’s for a mobile device or some other application. The Symbian Foundation says that this move gives the ecosystem greater potential for innovation and faster time-to-market. The release includes publication of the platform roadmap and planned features through 2011.

“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,” said Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation. The group also notes that anyone can now influence the roadmap and contribute new features.

All 108 packages featuring the platform’s source code now can be downloaded from tiny.symbian.org/open under the terms of the Eclipse Public License and other open-source licenses. The complete development kits for creating applications (the Symbian Developer Kit) and mobile devices (the Product Development Kit) are available as well.

These kits are compatible with Symbian^3, which is the very latest version of the Platform. Symbian^3 also is now fully open source, and it will be “feature complete” during the first quarter of 2010, the Symbian Foundation says.

Symbian Foundation