There are two big news in the mobile world, first, Nokia buys Symbian and second, the creation of the Symbian Foundation.
Symbian was established by far sighted players to offer an advanced open operating system and software skills to the whole mobile industry”, said Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian
In a press release from Nokia:
Nokia today announced it has launched a cash offer to acquire all of the shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own, at a price of EUR 3.647 per share. The net cash outlay from Nokia to purchase the approximately 52% of Symbian Limited shares it does not already own will be approximately EUR 264 million.
“This is a significant milestone in our software strategy” said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia. “Symbian is already the leading open platform for mobile devices. Through this acquisition and the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, it will undisputedly be the most attractive platform for mobile innovation. This will drive the development of new and compelling, web-enabled applications to delight a new generation of consumers.”
In a separate press release, Nokia announced the formation of the Symbian Foundation – established to provide royalty-free open platform and accelerate innovation.
By making the Symbain Platform fully open source, it means anyone can develop for it, there’ll be a single, unified operating system for mobile phones and rapid innovation of services and software.
The Symbian Foundation platform will be available to members under a royalty-free license from this non-profit foundation. The Symbian Foundation will provide, manage and unify the platform for its members. Also, it will commit to moving the platform to open source during the next two years, with the intent to use the Eclipse Public License. This will make the platform code available to all for free, bringing additional innovation to the platform and engaging even a broader community in future developments.
The foundation is expected to start operating during the first half of 2009. Membership of the foundation will be open to all organizations, for a low annual membership fee of US $1,500.
Visit the Symbian Foundation website for more info.
