Symbian Foundation to Close Up Shop

by Sam Dean - Nov. 29, 2010Comments (0)

It's official: The Symbian Foundation intends to shut down its web sites on December 17th, marking a major concession in the mobile OS and smartphone wars. As we noted here, Nokia has already announced its plans to take the reins of the foundation, which had been charged with leading an effort to take the Symbian platform open source--an effort that suffered from woeful delays and problems. In fact, not long after that open source goal was announced, we wondered if the foundation was DOA. The moves from the foundation and Nokia are all the more seismic because the Symbian platform still commands close to half the smartphone OS market.

According to a post from the Symbian Foundation:

"All of the websites hosted by the Symbian Foundation will be affected:

www.symbian.org, www.symbian.org/cn, www.symbian.org/jp
developer.symbian.org, developer.symbian.org/cn, developer.symbian.org/jp, kernel.symbian.org
horizon.symbian.org
ideas.symbian.org
blog.symbian.org, blogcn.symbian.org, blogjp.symbian.org

The @Symbian Twitter feed and the Symbian.org fan page on Facebook are also likely to be discontinued."

While there are still some sketchy plans for delivering Symbian source code on disks and USB drives, this shutdown marks a huge open source failure, and success with the foundation's open source efforts could have helped mount a significant challenge to Android. Recall that Android has only had strong market momentum for about a year and a half. This is what OStatic's John Mark Walker had to say last November:

"There are a couple of problems with the foundation's approach, beginning with its pace of development. They're just moving too slow, period. They act like they're not facing fierce competition."

Indeed, not hearing the footsteps from platforms such as Android contributed mightily to the Symbian Foundation's woes. We'll see what Nokia can dredge from what remains of it.