I just got this news:

http://www.linux.com/feature/139596


      Nokia buys Symbian, will open Symbian OS

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols <http://www.practical-tech.com/> on June
24, 2008 (11:00:00 PM)

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Symbian, the company behind the popular proprietary mobile/embedded
operating system of the same name, just turned 10, but it won't see its
next birthday. Nokia, which had long owned a substantial portion of
Symbian, announced today that it would be buying the rest of the
company, 52% for about &euro264; million, or approximately $410 million.
In addition to purchasing Symbian, Nokia says it will be open-sourcing
the Symbian operating system.

In a press call from London, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said that
Nokia will place the code in the hands of a new vendor-neutral
organization: The Symbian Foundation <http://www.symbianfoundation.org>.
This isn't just a nod toward working with an open source development
community. Besides Nokia, organizations such as AT&T;, Motorola, Samsung,
Sony Ericsson, Texas Instruments, and more than a dozen other companies
are investing in the new open Symbian.

On the call, Kallasvuo said, "This is a significant milestone in our
software strategy. Symbian is already the leading open platform for
mobile devices. Through this acquisition and the establishment of the
Symbian Foundation, it will undisputedly be the most attractive platform
for mobile innovation. This will drive the development of new and
compelling Web-enabled applications to delight a new generation of
consumers."

According to sources at Nokia, code will be released to the public for
the first time in either the last quarter of 2008 or the first quarter
of 2009. All of Symbian OS and its development tools will be made
available by 2010. At this time, Nokia and its Symbian Foundation allies
plans on releasing the program under the Eclipse Public License 1.0
<http://www.opensource.org/licenses/eclipse-1.0.php>.

Nokia has recently shown a great deal of interest in acquiring and
supporting open source projects. On June 18, Nokia completed its
acquisition of Trolltech <http://trolltech.com>, the company behind the
Qt application development framework, which in turn is the foundation of
the popular KDE Linux desktop environment. Nokia has already announced
plans to use Qt in Maemo, the Linux-based operating system it uses on
its N8x series of Linux tablets.

Nokia declined to comment on whether it would provide developers with
the tools needed to integrate Qt on top of Symbian. However, Symbian has
long served as the underpinnings for several palmtop interfaces,
including Nokia's own S60 <http://www.s60.com/life>, Sony Ericsson's UIQ
<http://www.uiq.com>, and NTT/DoCoMo's MOAP (Mobile Oriented
Applications Platform <http://www.nttdocomo.com/glossary/m/MOAP.html>).
Thus, bringing a KDE-style interface to Symbian phones and mobile
devices should be relatively easy. Nokia also announced that it would be
releasing S60 to the Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola will be
contributing at least some UIQ code to the cause, and NTT/DocoMo, while
light on specifics, also appears to be ready to open source MOAP under
the Symbian Foundation.

In short, Symbian and its major interfaces are well on their way to
becoming a completely open source operating system and development
platform. This spells potential trouble for Linux embedded systems.
Google, faced with delays in its own Linux-based Android platform, made
the best of things in its response to Nokia's news. A representative for
Sean Carlson, Google's manager of global communications, said, "Openness
fosters innovation, benefiting consumers. We're very pleased to see
other major players in the mobile industry moving in this direction."

Geof Blaber, director of mobile device software research at CCS Insight
<http://www.ccsinsight.com>, thinks Nokia wasn't so much attacking
possible mobile phone competitors as it was making a defensive play,
because even as Symbian had "grown into the dominant supplier of
smartphone operating systems," it was "being challenged by a variety of
new contenders."

Google, Blaber says, "challenged the commercial model, stating that its
Android platform has reduced the cost of software to 'close to zero.'"
Also, the LiMo Foundation <http://www.limofoundation.org>, a consortium
working on a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices, "has
strong support from network operators, which have been attracted by its
governance model. Operators believe they have more opportunity to
influence the direction of this open source platform than with Symbian
and its S60 and UIQ user interfaces." Other research houses, such as
IDC, have also pointed out that the LiMo Foundation was making inroads
with Linux into the mobile phone business.
<http://www.linux.com/feature/119159>.

And, of course, no one in the mobile phone business can ignore Apple and
the iPhone. "Apple has raised the bar from a technical perspective, and
Symbian licensees need to respond quickly to its touch-screen user
interface, high performance, and easy-to-use development tools," Blaber
says.

Rick Lehrbaum, embedded operating system expert and editor of DeviceGuru
<http://www.deviceguru.com/>, says the mobile software player for whom
this announcement is the most trouble is Microsoft. As Lehrbaum puts it,
"It certainly makes Microsoft the odd man out."

Tristan Louis, editor of TNL.net <http://www.tnl.net>, says in a blog
posting that Nokia's plans serve Nokia in three ways
<http://www.tnl.net/blog/2008/06/24/no-changes-in-mobile>: "I get to
keep partners still involved but get them to agree to my taking charge.
I get other people to improve my code and/or developing FOR it, thus
allowing me to counter a potential Google threat if it ever
materializes." And, I get to look more "open" than Apple and will use
that in my messaging.

At the end of the day, though, Louis doesn't see a lot of change
happening in the mobile space. He dismisses Sun and Palm, and as for
Linux, it still "[has] teeth [but] will probably see its market share
dwindle as its differentiator (more open than others) is gone." Short of
acquiring BlackBerry powerhouse RIM, Louis doesn't see Microsoft rocking
the mobile device market share boat. In a conversation about the impact
of the Nokia deal, Louis said that he thinks Microsoft might go after
RIM, or if that doesn't pan out, we could see "RIM/Google or RIM/Nokia."

For now, the experts agree on one thing. This move will either improve
Nokia's position, or, at the least, solidify its hold on the mobile
market despite anything that Google, LiMo, or Apple can do. That said,
it wasn't so long ago that Apple had no mobile phone market share, and
betting against Google or Linux has not been a winning proposition in
any market lately.

/Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been writing about technology and the
business of technology since CP/M-80 was the operating system of choice
for PCs and 2BSD Unix was what the cool kids used on their computers./

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