[Ben]

A big day for Symbian. As of 2PM it'll finally be open source as promised. But is it too little, too late?

"The group behind the world's most popular smartphone operating system - Symbian - is giving away "billions of dollars" worth of code for free. The Symbian Foundation's announced that it would make its code open source in 2008 and has now completed the move.

It means that any organisation or individual can now use and modify the platform's underlying source code "for any purpose".

Symbian has shipped in more than 330m mobile phones, the foundation says.

It believes the move will attract new developers to work on the system and help speed up the pace of improvements.

"This is the largest open source migration effort ever," Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation told BBC News.
"It will increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform."

Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester research, said the move was about Symbian "transitioning from one business model to another" as well as trying to gain "momentum and mindshare" for software that had been overshadowed by the release of Apple's iPhone and Google Android operating system."
"
Continues: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8496263.stm

[The Mullet of G]

Analysts crack me up, they have to be about the dumbest people on the face of this planet, they are either pointing out the massively obvious or making statements that simply aren't backed up by any sort of facts what so ever. How can a company sell more than double its nearest rivals yet still be overshadowed? How is that even possible?

I'm interested to see what an open source Symbian can bring to the table, I would have liked to have seen this happen sooner, but I guess its not exactly something that could have been done overnight.

[Ben]

I agree about the dumbness, I often fail to understand the point of 'analysts'!

To be honest, though, I'd have said Symbian being overshadowed is a 'state the obvious' not a ridiculous statement. No, it's definitely not outsold, but the top end of the market has been massively cannibalised by BlackBerry, Apple, and Android - even Nokia are using Maemo!

[The Mullet of G]

I love the analysts that predict stuff that will happen long after they are dead, how easy is that job, by the time your found out to be a charlatan your long gone. :D

I can see your point, but I would argue that if something sells twice as much as its next closest rival then its hard to use the term "overshadowed" Sure the OS might not be the most modern and shiny out there or even the best, but twice as many people still preferred it over the competition, when people think of a mobile phone the majority don't think about Apple or Blackberry or even Android, its still Nokia they think of. Taking into account Nokia have only lost about 8 or 9% of the smartphone market share since 2006 its also hard to use the term cannibalised, infact I'd go as far as saying its a poor show from the competition.