Symbian Foundation opens up

Mobile operating system developer the Symbian Foundation officially opened its doors this week, making a beta version of its web site available to members of the Symbian community.

The site includes a full developer offering featuring platform release information, council charters, wikis, forums as well as access to the SDK, SCM (Mercurial), Bugzilla, tools, documents and FAQs.

The organisation was formed in the wake of Nokia’s 2008 acquisition of the remaining 52.1 per cent of Symbian that it didn’t already own, uniting it with the S60, UIQ and MOAP platforms. With the backing of Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo, the Foundation also proposed to introduce an open source licence model for Symbian and the S60, UIQ and DoCoMo’s MOAP platforms.

Since the membership programme opened in February 2009, 81 companies have applied for membership and are either going through the formal process or have become members, 50 of which are first time endorsers.

Once involved, members will get access to the Symbian source code, royalty free, and will be able to licence, modify and distribute source code; gain access to council meeting plans and deliverables; participate in working groups and annual member meetings; and gain eligibility for board and council seats.

The foundation’s executive director, Lee Williams, said that as previously announced, the foundation plans to move the Symbian platform to open source in the next year, effectively making the platform code available to all for free.

In related news, the foundation has also unveiled its new logo – a big, yellow heart.