Every now and then a news item from within my own industry manages to catch me by surprise. Like this thing here today: Nokia to acquire Symbian.
Okay, so fine, paying a quarter billion euros for a platform that has often been called the developers’ nightmare is one thing. But then Nokia is also forming a Symbian Foundation at same time, with some interesting goals:
The foundation is also committed to moving the platform to open source during the next two years and intends to release the platform under the Eclipse Public License. This will make the platform code available to all for free.
Qué?
My knee-jerk reaction to this was that who in their right mind would ever want to see the Symbian source code?! I mean if I had to pick one platform or product that I don’t want to know how it’s built, it’d be Symbian. Could be a publicity stunt in an attempt to gain lots of goodwill from a dying platform. It’s not like the platform is exactly salvageable, no matter how many open-source developers you throw at it.
Whatever the reasons and the eventual outcome, this was one interesting piece of news. Of course, it’s something that should’ve happened 10 years ago; the Symbian today might have then been a very different beast.
