Symbian operating system now open source

The Symbian Foundation moved forward today by offering up the full Symbian smartphone platform to open source. Programmers will be able to download, modify and use the software for free. The organization has already made some of its code available.

The Symbian Foundation estimates there are 330 million handsets running Symbian, and the company been working for the last two years to get version 3 opened up, with the work now completed ahead of schedule. Version 3 includes support for HDMI output, improved memory management and a new graphics architecture. The plan was to finish the transition of putting the OS under the Eclipse development license and work out deals with existing third party developers by later this summer.

The foundation hopes the move will attract new developers to work on the system and help speed up the pace of improvements.

“This is the largest open source migration effort ever,” Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation told
Symbian is still the most stable on the market but it has been over shadowed in the smartphone market by media heavyweights Google and Apple. Google’s Android operating system is proving itself to be an increasingly popular option with the mobile phone software development community.