News

Nokia ditches open source for Symbian

The Finnish manufacturer closes off the struggling mobile OS but claims it is still ‘open for business.’

8 Apr 2011

Nokia claimed Symbian is no longer an open source platform, in a surprising blog post from the firm this week.

Entitled not open source, just open for business,' the statement said Symbian was being delivered in a different way, giving access to Japanese OEMs and the "relatively small community" of developers already working with the operating system. However, the source code would be kept locked away from anyone else.

"Through these pages we are releasing source code to these collaborators, but are not maintaining Symbian as an open source development project," the blog read.

Nokia said it was working through a backlog of applications to register as a licensee for the code but it is "processing continuously."

The blog has received a number of responses from disappointed Symbian fans, including one taking the ultimate dig at the company saying: "Now I like Android more."

A post from an anonymous user added: "I was excited about Symbian going open source. It had a name of a good pedigree and such. I even bought a Symbian phone in hopes of being able to roll my own OS image and tinkering with it."

"Now you're playing the wooly words game again. Semantics shemantics. Your "open" is a lie. You aren't an enabler. You can't be trusted to keep your own promises. You aren't even an innovator any longer."

This is the latest knock back from Nokia for the Symbian platform in a relatively short space of time.

Back in February, the manufacturer announced it would be putting the mobile OS on the backburner and making Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 its primary platform.

Stephen Elop, chief executive of Nokia and previous corporate bigwig at Microsoft, said Symbian would become a "franchise platform" and the company still hoped to sell 150 million devices based on the OS in the coming years.