Symbian Releases Microkernel As Open Source, Finally

by Sam Dean - Oct. 21, 2009Comments (5)

It was well over a year ago now that news of the Symbian operating system--found on approximately half of global smartphones--going open source broke. The news was interpreted as particularly important to Nokia's forward-looking Symbian strategy, but after all this time, an open source version of Symbian's platform is still only in beta testing.

Today, though, as EETimes notes, Symbian has released its platform microkernel, and software development kit (SDK), as open source under the Eclipse Public License. The Symbian Foundation claims that it is moving quickly toward an open source model, which is questionable, but the release of the EKA2 kernel is a signal that Symbian still means business about adopting an open source model.

Accenture, ARM, Nokia and Texas Instruments contributed software to the microkernel, Symbian officials said. They also note that the microkernel is responsible for most key functions in the operating system. What puzzles me, though, are the many posts and news stories that I'm seeing that seem to agree with the Symbian Foundation's claim that it is nine months ahead of schedule with its shift to open source.

Ahead of schedule after more than a year? Has anyone alerted the Symbian Foundation and Nokia that there is an absolute, competitive maelstrom going on in the smartphone arena? Android will soon come out in a full version 2.0 and has major momentum. Meanwhile, Nokia is bleeding money and taking an old-fashioned butt-kicking from the iPhone in the smartphone market. Nokia's North American sales are down more than 31 percent over last year.

It's about time that the Symbian platform showed some actual signs of going open source in earnest. If it does, it will only be good for market share, but I'm really not sure that this latest release qualifies as "ahead of schedule" in this mobile technology market.


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5 Comments
 

Hi Sam - I work with the Symbian Foundation, so you can evaluate my comment with that disclosure :-) When Nokia announced its plan (a year ago as you point out) it was a PLAN -- not the beginning of implementation. A lot of things had to happen to complete the purchase of Symbian Software Limited, create the foundation, etc.


And releasing as open source an operating system in use on 50% of the smartphones in the world has never been done, so all involved recognized that this would be a huge undertaking. That is why Nokia at the time said it would be mid-2010 before the OS was released under the EPL.


The largest issue has been third party intellectual property which Symbian Software Limited had licensed for inclusion with the Symbian OS as a commercial (binary) product, but had never been released as open source by its respective owners. So every part of the OS had to be reviewed for third party IP and one of two things has to be done -- either a proper license to release the code has to be obtained from the owner OR the code has to be replaced with code which can be (or already is) released as open source.


And this work didn't begin on the day the plan was announced. And while the work did start before the foundation was formally created, things started slow with the first official board of directors meeting for the Symbian Foundation only happening February 5th of 2009! All of the source code was first made available through the foundation to its members on April 3rd (under the SFL) and the first EPL code was released in May. So an enormous amount of work has actually happened in a very short period of time. And yes, we are ahead of schedule.


But perhaps your point was that the schedule was inadequate. I like your phrase -- "...absolute, competitive maelstrom..." Yes, we know :-)


We do believe that this is one period in a longer game and that we are putting in place the right kind of completely open collaborative community which will foster the innovation -- company and product creation -- which will allow Symbian to continue in the future as the most widely used mobile platform in the world.


Stay tuned next week as the Symbian Exchange and Exposition unfolds in London (October 27th and 28th)!


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@Ted, thanks for the clarification on the foundation's stance. I'm sure it is a daunting task to go open source given Symbian's market share. We will tune in for the new from London next week.


Sam


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open source is definitely the strongest way to go. Hopefully everyone will realize this.


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Android has the moment. The Chinese companies are fully working with Android to deploy new products.

At the first time the Chinese has a really competitive software to deploy in cheap hardware.

In a short time you will see Android running in smart-phones under US 50.


When Chrome OS arrives, the game will be really funny with a lot of notebooks under US 100 running Chrome OS.


In a short term we will see American companies who sells smart-phones and notebooks under costs pressure from the Asian market.


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I think it's not that easy to open source code that wasn't ever meant to be open source. Everything that went in Symbian now has to be open sourced so it will probably take some time but to see progress and things moving at a pretty decent speed is certainly good news.

I'm not expert in OS and mobile phones OS but from what I understand Symbian does have some advantages over Android and perhaps other smartphones in general. I can run on lower end stuff like feature phone where Android can't. Sure , Android is OK but it's pretty "fat" , it has lots of Java code , the Dalvik VM .... . Symbian has been a mobile phone OS for a lot longer than the young Android. With some new Qt based UI a Symbian phone should provide a good user experience while undercutting Android and other Linux smartphones.

I'm actually a Linux fan but I actually see some potential for Symbian if it's open source. And you're wrong , the Chinese aren't big fans of Android, 99% of their current smartphones are running Windows Mobile and are about 150-200$. The do have feature phone which include dual sim and even wifi at around 100 $ , if Symbian could run on those, that would be fun.


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