The Symbian Foundation offers free code to everyone to enable them to
contribute openly to the future of mobile

SAN FRANCISCO, US, and LONDON, UK, 4 February, 2010 – The Symbian
Foundation today completed the open source release of the source code
for the world’s most widely-used smartphone platform. The Symbian
platform, which has been developed over more than 10 years and has
shipped in more than 330 million devices around the world, is now
completely open and the source code is available for free. The
transition of this market-leading platform from proprietary code to
open source is the largest in software history. The move has been
completed four months ahead of schedule and provides the basis for
unlimited mobile development based on innovation and openness.

Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the code
for any purpose, whether that be for a mobile device or for something
else entirely. This strategic move provides the Symbian ecosystem with
greater potential for innovation, faster time-to-market and the
opportunity to develop on the platform for free. Symbian’s commitment
to openness also includes complete transparency in future plans,
including the publication of the platform roadmap and planned features
up to and including 2011. Anyone can now influence the roadmap and
contribute new features.

Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation, comments:
“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. When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of
completing the open source release of the platform by mid-2010 and
it’s because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our
staff and our member companies that we’ve reached it well ahead of
schedule.”

IDC Analyst John Delaney remarks: “It’s increasingly important for
smartphone platforms to offer developers something unique. The placing
into open source of the world’s most widely-used smartphone platform
emphatically fits that bill. It will be exciting to see where this
takes the industry.”

All 108 packages containing the source code of the Symbian platform
can now be downloaded from Symbian’s developer web site
(tiny.symbian.org/open), under the terms of the Eclipse Public License
and other open source licenses. Also available for download are the
complete development kits for creating applications (the Symbian
Developer Kit) and mobile devices (the Product Development Kit). These
kits are compatible with Symbian^3, the very latest version of the
platform, which is now fully open source and will be “feature
complete” during Q1 of this year.

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