Reprinted from TidBITS#937/21-Jul-08 with permission.
Copyright (C) 2008, TidBITS. All rights reserved.
http://www.tidbits.com/

Symbian Smartphone Platform Goes Free, Partly Open Source
---------------------------------------------------------
  by Glenn Fleishman <glenn@tidbits.com>
  article link: <http://db.tidbits.com/article/9666>

  Nokia will buy out the other owners of Symbian, a firm that develops
  the same-named smartphone operating system that dominates the
  worldwide market for phones that double as palmtop portable
  computers. Nokia will sign the software over to a new foundation,
  and gradually release parts of the platform under an open-source
  license. This move challenges Google's Android platform, developed
  as part of a large consortium called the Open Handset Alliance, and
  Apple's worldwide push for the iPhone (see "Google's View of Our
  Cell Phone Future Is an Android, Not a GPhone," 2007-11-12).

<http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jyW4sR1zdLoZb2u-COOWIrMIRTlwD91GHF001>
<http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9291>


**Nokia Builds a Unified Platform** -- Nokia plans to form the
  non-profit Symbian Foundation in 2009 that will include some of the
  other current minority owners - notably Sony Ericsson and Samsung -
  and add massive telcos like Japan's NTT DoCoMo, worldwide carrier
  Vodafone (in Europe, India, Australia, and New Zealand), and AT&T in
  America. They'll also pick up handset makers LG and Motorola and
  chipmaker Texas Instruments (TI). LG, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung,
  and TI are also members of the Open Handset Alliance, and the three
  carriers offer and will offer competing smartphone platforms. AT&T
  and Vodafone sell the iPhone 3G.

<http://www.symbianfoundation.org/>
<http://www.symbian.com/about/overview/ownership/ownership.html>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vodafone_market_share>
<http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html>

  As part of Nokia's acquisition, a few other smartphone platforms and
  variants will be folded into the main Symbian arm, reducing overlap
  as well as choices, and ostensibly providing a more robust system by
  choosing superior components from each to build into Symbian. This
  includes Nokia's internal S60 platform, DoCoMo's MOAP, and UIQ,
  owned by Sony Ericsson and Motorola.

  A fully revised platform incorporating elements from S60, MOAP, and
  UIQ won't ship until 2010, but components will start being released
  in 2009, and all future platform development for Symbian and S60
  will be forward compatible. One such component slated for 2009 is
  the S60WebKit, an already open-sourced component of the S60 platform
  that itself relies on the same underlying open-source components in
  WebKit used by Apple for its Safari browser and anything in Mac OS X
  that renders Web pages and widgets in other programs. WebKit is not
  identical to Safari: it acts as the foundation for JavaScript
  interpretation and rendering.

<http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/S60browser/>
<http://webkit.org/>


**Symbian Everywhere Except U.S.** -- While we don't know much about
  Symbian in the United States, that's an aberration, in part due to
  Nokia's lack of interest in creating CDMA phones for Verizon and
  Sprint back when CDMA ruled the roost before T-Mobile, Cingular, and
  AT&T Wireless built a complementary robust national GSM market.
  (Cingular and AT&T Wireless merged and then were folded into the new
  AT&T.)

  The Symbian platform powered 67 percent of smartphones sold
  worldwide in 2007, according to research firm Canalys. In contrast,
  Windows Mobile hit 13 percent and Research in Motion's BlackBerry OS
  10 percent. In the fourth quarter of 2007, Apple showed up with 7
  percent of worldwide sales by platform, while Symbian dropped to 65
  percent, Windows Mobile dipped very slightly to 12 percent, and RIM
  increased a tad to 11 percent. Linux filled in the remaining 5
  percent.

<http://www.canalys.com/pr/2008/r2008021.htm>

  In the United States, the BlackBerry OS dominates with 42 percent of
  sales last quarter, Apple has 27 percent, and Microsoft 21 percent.
  In the Asian-Pacific region, Symbian owns 85 percent of new
  smartphone sales, and it has 80 percent in the combined markets of
  Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.


**Conserving Costs, and Reducing Fees** -- Nokia says all members of
  the new Symbian Foundation will receive royalty-free licenses to use
  the system. In contrast, Nokia paid $250 million to Symbian for
  licenses in 2007, even though they were the 48-percent minority
  owner. The $410 million buyout seems to make perfect sense for all
  the partners, and it's a way to compete more effectively against
  upstarts by reducing reasons _not_ to use Symbian. (Symbian is
  privately held, and releases limited financial data, the most recent
  being in 2006. While the company booked a large profit in a variety
  of categories, it's unclear how much was rebated to shareholders,
  and it's also apparent that Nokia will continue to need to fund the
  foundation along with its new partners.)

<http://www.symbian.com/about/financial/financial.html>

  The Google-backed Android platform has no royalty or license fees.
  The alliance behind it has started by releasing application
  components under an open-source license, and plans "over time" to
  release "more of the code that makes up Android" as open source. The
  first Android-based phones are expected to be offered on T-Mobile's
  network in late 2008.

<http://code.google.com/android/kb/licensingandoss.html>

  Apple, Microsoft, and RIM have software developer kits for
  developing software on their platforms, but don't have open-source
  policies for their operating systems. (Apple has to release certain
  improvements they make to open-source and other code that they
  modify and distribute as part of the iPhone's OS, but they aren't
  required to release the entire platform, just as with Mac OS X.)

  Apple and RIM find themselves in the same camp now, as hardware
  makers that also control a platform, compared with Android, Windows
  Mobile, and Symbian, which are platforms that can be licensed by any
  qualifying handset maker. Neither Apple nor RIM has any conceivable
  motivation to license their platforms.

  This could put pressure on Microsoft to change the terms and nature
  of Windows Mobile royalties and licensing - it charges $14 per phone
  today - although it's hard to see what that gains them, as Windows
  Mobile phones are designed for tight enterprise integration. With
  many of those integration features now in the iPhone, along with
  RIM's U.S. market share, the Redmond giant may need to shake up its
  plans.


**One Master, One Recipe** -- Nokia has shifted the sands somewhat.
  While I'm reminded of Fake Steve Jobs's classic post last year on
  the Open Handset Alliance, it seems like this move reduces the
  number of cooks involved in Symbian, turning a company with many
  masters into a foundation with a single purpose.

<http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/11/its-not-phone-its-alliance.html>