Symbian moves to full open source

One of the world largest mobile phone operating system companies "Symbian" has finally moved to open source.

Speaking to the BBC Ian Fogg and analyst for Forrester research stated that:

"It's useful for them to say Symbian is now open - Google has done very well out of that"

This move makes the mobile phone OS market primarly open source, with companies like Android and now Symbian leading the way.

Lee Williams of Symbian also speaking to bbc.co.uk said

"It will increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform"

This is a very interesting point as it clearly shows the advantage to business's in becoming open-source. I feel that many companies won't go open source because the research and investment that has gone into the development of their code is very valuable. It also comes from the old more traditional way of doing business. That is adding value to a product, and keeping that value under wraps so that competition can't compete.

Companies need to realise that if the code is open source, developers and customers will work the code which means companies will have value added to their product, without the need to pay for research. On the other side of coin companies are also aware that competition can see the code and develop ways around it, which is probably the key factor stopping companies going open source.

The markets are changing and business's need to realise that perhaps this is the way forward. When Google announced their OS would be open source I felt it was "safer" for Google as the majority of their business and income came from other sources such as the search engine and advertising. However symbian has a lot of money in this market, and if they can go open source then perhaps companies like Apple can too.

However this move may have came from one of it's primary share holders Nokia who bought the company outright in 2008. Perhaps Nokia is seeing decreases sales leaking into the battle between Android and Apple, and has decided to enter the fight and try and get some of this young and evolving market for themselves.

Symbian stated that "they thought of it first" and that this idea came up at least a year before Android and the original iPhone. This reminded me of something a child would say funny how many companies are like little children...anyway.

Regardless, this move shows that perhaps Apple will see the value and move to open source, which could see a lot of competition developing, and competition breeds amazing new developments, new products, and new lawsuits.

So the next few years should be interesting.