In December 2008, Nokia bought Symbian Ltd., the company behind Symbian OS; as a result, Nokia has become the major contributor to Symbian's code, as it now had the development resources for both the Symbian OS core and the user interface. Since then, Nokia has been maintaining their own code repository for the platform development, regularly releasing their development to the public repository.[6] File
Symbian was intended to be developed by a community led by the Symbian Foundation,[7] which was first announced in June 2008 and which officially launched in April 2009. Its objective was to publish the source code for the entire Symbian platform under the OSI- and FSF-approved Eclipse Public License (EPL). The code was published under EPL on 4 February 2010; Symbian Foundation reported this event to be the largest codebase transitioned to Open Source in history.[8][9]
However, some important components within Symbian OS were licensed from third parties, which prevented the foundation from publishing the full source under EPL immediately; instead much of the source was published under a more restrictive Symbian Foundation License (SFL) and access to the full source code was limited to member companies only, although membership was open to any organisation.[10]
In November 2010, the Symbian Foundation announced that due to a lack of support from funding members, it would transition to a licensing-only organisation; Nokia announced that it will take over the stewardship of the Symbian platform. Symbian Foundation will remain as the trademark holder and licensing entity and will only have non-executive directors involved.
On February 11, 2011, Nokia announced a partnership with Microsoft that would see it adopt Windows Phone 7 for smartphones, reducing the number of devices running Symbian over the coming two years.[11]
[edit] Version history
Symbian releases are styled Symbian^1, Symbian^2 etc. (vocalised as "Symbian one", "Symbian two").
Symbian^1, as the first release, forms the basis for the platform. It incorporates Symbian OS and S60 5th Edition (which is built on Symbian OS 9.4) and thus it was not made available as open source.[12]
Symbian^2 was the first royalty-free version of Symbian.[13] While portions of Symbian^2 are EPL licensed, most of the source code is under the proprietary SFL license and available only to members of the Symbian Foundation. On June 1, 2010, a number of Japanese companies including DoCoMo and Sharp announced smartphones using Symbian^2.[14]
Symbian^3 was announced on 15 February 2010.[15] It was designed to be a more ‘next generation’ smartphone platform. The Symbian^3 release introduced new features such as a new 2D and 3D graphics architecture, UI improvements, and support for external displays through HDMI.[16][17] It has single tap menus and up to three customizable homescreens. The Symbian^3 SDK (Software Development Kit) was released September 2010.[18]
Four phones with the open source Symbian^3 have been released, the Nokia N8, Nokia C6-01, Nokia E7-00 and Nokia C7-00.[19]
Symbian^4 was expected to be released in the first half of 2011. However, Nokia announced in October 2010 that Symbian^4 will not ship as a separate release. Instead, improvements to Symbian will be delivered as software updates to all current Symbian^3 devices.[20]
