Handset manufacturers Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo announced today their intent to create one single open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone, they plan to establish the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of this unified software platform.
To this end, they will combine their Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) software platforms. Membership of the non-profit Foundation will be open to all organizations. This initiative is supported by current shareholders and management of Symbian Limited, who have been actively involved in its development. Plans for the Foundation have already received wide support from other industry leaders. The move is clearly aimed at fighting proprietary systems such as Windows Mobile and Apple’s iPhone.
To enable the Foundation, Nokia today announced plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola also today announced their intention to contribute technology from UIQ, and DoCoMo has indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. From these contributions, the Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free licence from the Foundation’s first day of operation.
Contributions from Foundation members through open collaboration will be integrated to further enhance the platform. The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public Licence (EPL) 1.0.
The Foundation’s platform will build on the leading open mobile software platform, with more than 200 million phones, across 235 models, already shipped by multiple vendors and tens of thousands of third-party applications already available for Symbian OS-based devices.