This past Tuesday the Symbian Foundation made an announcement stating that it had just reached a new milestone in the progress towards making the Symbian operating system open source, thanks to the platform being released microkernel, and support for the SDK. According to the announcement, the kernel release comes 9 months before it was scheduled, which makes the progress look very promising indeed in terms of future OS migration.
The move began with a release of security code under EPL, which the Symbian Foundation has made available in open source for 16 out of 134 platform packages. The real time microkernel is seen as the core of the operating system, thanks to it being responsible for the management of all of the system resources and frameworks which every applications, and even every process, is based upon. The Foundation is offering the SDK entirely free of charge, hoping to let the community take full advantage.
For those of you who don’t understand what this means, it’s big – it’s really, REALLY big. It is as if Apple told you that you could play around with their operating system and change and improve on it however you liked, for free. Any open source is good when it comes to mobile operating systems as it allows the community to make their own contributions, which we’re looking forward to seeing.
The executive director of the Symbian Foundation, Lee Williams, stated; “The release of the microkernel demonstrates three vital, guiding principles of the foundation: first, the commitment of many community members to the development of the platform – in this case, Accenture, ARM, Nokia and Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) all made contributions; second, progress in fulfilling our commitment to a complete open source release of Symbian; and third, a tangible example of providing the most advanced mobile platform in the world.”
We could not be more excited; check back in for updates as they occur!
Tags: Symbian