{"id":1294,"date":"2008-06-26T18:27:42","date_gmt":"2008-06-26T16:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/general\/nokias-acquisition-of-symbian-is-a-great-win-for-open-source.html"},"modified":"2008-06-26T18:27:42","modified_gmt":"2008-06-26T16:27:42","slug":"nokias-acquisition-of-symbian-is-a-great-win-for-open-source","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/?p=1294","title":{"rendered":"Nokia&#8217;s acquisition of Symbian is a great win for open-source"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nokia, already a shareholder of Symbian, has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nokia.com\/A4136001?newsid=1230415\">announced<\/a> yesterday the acquisition of the remaining 52% it didn&#8217;t own for  \u20ac264 million, along with the promise to make it open-source in two years, with the launch of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.symbianfoundation.org\/\">Symbian Foundation<\/a>, where Nokia will be joined by AT&amp;T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.<\/p>\n<p>The Symbian OS platform has <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Symbian\">67% share<\/a> of the &#8220;smart mobile device&#8221; market and is powering around 200 million mobile phones sold to date, especially thanks to Nokia&#8217;s S60 platform used in its popular Series N and Series E phones. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT Docomo, will unite their Symbian-based platforms in an  open mobile software platform available for free to all Symbian Foundation members, in a move that seems a direct response to Google&#8217;s open-source (and free for manufacturers) <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/android\/\">Android<\/a> mobile platform, while still making economic sense for Nokia (who <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ccsinsight.com\/blog\/?p=93\">paid<\/a> \u20ac160M in royalties to Symbian Limited in 2007 alone).<\/p>\n<p>Tomorrow&#8217;s mobile business is all about software, Apple clearly demonstrates this with the iPhone. As Om Malik pointed out in a great <a href=\"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/2008\/06\/24\/symbian-iphone-the-new-mobile-reality\/\">post<\/a>, &#8220;in this platform game, the winner is going to be the one that can attract the most developers&#8221;. So with yesterday&#8217;s announcement, a big win for the open-source movement, Nokia is trying to face competition with open platforms like Mobile Linux and Google&#8217;s Android, and of course, less open but rich platforms like Apple&#8217;s iPhone, in an effort to attract the most and best developers to build mobile applications.<\/p>\n<div id=\"mainphotoarea\"><\/div><div class=\"theme-buttons\"><div class=\"fb-like\" data-href=\"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/?p=1294\" data-send=\"false\" data-layout=\"box_count\" data-width=\"71\" data-show-faces=\"false\" data-font=\"arial\" data-locale=\"en_US\"><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nokia, already a shareholder of Symbian, has announced yesterday the acquisition of the remaining 52% it didn&#8217;t own for \u20ac264 million, along with the promise to make it open-source in two years, with the launch of the Symbian Foundation, where Nokia will be joined by AT&amp;T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}