Mobile telecoms firm Nokia has announced its intention to make
parts of the Symbian operating system open source as it makes a
£208m bid for Symbian, the mobile phone software developer.
The Finnish handset-maker, which owns 48% of Symbian, has
received confirmation from Symbian's other majority shareholders
that the deal will go ahead.
Nokia has announced
plans to create the Symbian Foundation, an open source software
development community that aims to spur innovation. The foundation
will make part of the source code for its mobile phone operating
system free to developers.
"The company anticipates a wealth of open-source-driven
innovation by all other contributors that Nokia itself will be able
to take full advantage of. This is likely to be extremely cost
effective," said Tony Rizzo, research director of mobility at 451
Group.
"The foundation will not employ a single engineer or developer.
All engineering and development work will come from the open source
community," he said.
Geoff Blaber, an
analyst at CCS Insight, said it was only a matter of time
before Nokia bought out its five partners in Symbian. Over the last
ten years, Symbian has grown into the dominant supplier of
smartphone operating systems.
But the dominance is under threat from a variety of new
contenders including Google and Apple.
"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 said on his blog.
Symbian's competitive landscape has started to change rapidly
over the past year with new entrants and old competitors increasing
their influence, said Adam Leach, a principal analyst at Ovum.
"Linux has become a real threat to Symbian's business with a
number of Linux initiatives gaining serious momentum," he said.
"In the longer term, perhaps there is some truth in the rumours
that Nokia has a new Linux-based software platform on the blocks
for high-end multimedia devices. It seems almost unthinkable that
it would consider open-sourcing Symbian and S60 if it did not have
something else up its sleeve," he said.
Other shareholders in Symbian include Sony Ericsson, Ericsson,
Panasonic Mobile Communications and Siemens. Nokia expects Samsung
Electronics, a partial stakeholder in Symbian, to agree to the sale
but has not received confirmation yet.
Nokia expects the acquisition to be completed during the fourth
quarter of 2008.