Nokia takes Symbian open source. What will this mean for mobile Linux?

June 25, 2008 (Wednesday) | Linux

In one of the biggest news stories of the year, Nokia has acquired all of the rights to the Symbian operating system (OS) and open sourced it under the Eclipse license. In one fell swoop, the need for mobile Linux just became far less obvious. With 60 percent of the mobile market, Symbian has long been the dominant mobile OS. While Nokia has recently been dabbling with Linux, this move presumably will shift its efforts back to Symbian. Indeed, Nokia's move may actually completely refactor the mobile industry's rising affection for Linux. As Glyn Moody suggests, developers already know Symbian and are likely to redouble their efforts there instead of moving to rival platforms like Google's Android and other mobile Linux platforms. Is this a bad thing? I don't think so. It's not Linux, per se, that is important to mobile. It's open source. Whether through an open-source Symbian or open-source Linux, the benefits to developers is the same: Transparency, flexibility, and community. ...