Some Quick Thoughts On The Symbian Foundation: Nokia’s New Message
by Ewan Spence
With hindsight, if the Symbian partners had made the move to open source the base OS, the triumvirate of user interfaces, and place all the developer tools and knowledge in a single place a year ago, it would have been seen as leading the way in the mobile. And while the pragmatist knows that this move will have been months in the planning, it looks a touch more defensive than it actually is.
Make no bones about it, this is a big deal. Imagine if Microsoft suddenly decided to make Vista open source. To commit to putting out every line of code under an open source licence such as the Eclipse Public Licence)
Nokia had made the move to buy out the remaining partners in Symbian, thus gaining control and ownership of the company; it’s IP – primarily the Symbian OS; and the staff. The staff would become Nokia employees, and the operating system would be placed into the Symbian Foundation, and over a two year period it would be made fully open source, alongside the S60, UIQ and MOAP user interfaces (which eventually would be integrated into a single UI, the unified platform of Symbian OS, due in 2010).
In the short term, not much is going to change. The manufacturers have their product line-ups sorted for the festive season and into 2009. The Symbian OS has a strong roadmap, with updates roughly every six months to the base code will remain. Long term the per handset fee (of roughly $5 a unit) will be removed, all the code will be visible, and a unified UI will help the developer base focus on making more programs, rather than make one program run on more than one UI.
It’s the medium term where it gets interesting; the point where Symbain does the switch over, and could (if not managed correctly) take their eye off the ball with all the management meetings and staff re-orientation. There’s also the fact that the UIQ interface is now effectively dead – the unified UI will be based on S60 and take elements of UIQ and MOAP. UIQ have laid off a little more than half their staff, and I wouldn’t expect to see another major iteration of UIQ now – which leaves Sony Ericsson with a phone OS that could now be at a dead end.
It’s certainly interesting times, and a bit of a gamble on Nokia’s part, but tat the very least they’re only gambling the same amount of money they would pay Symbian in licence fees over a year or so. So financially it’s worth taking.
And if they can establish Symbian OS as the default OS (just as MS-Dos did) then it will pay off in spades.
