Symbian open sources mobile platform code

The Symbian Foundation has announced that the source code for its mobile platform will be completely open sourced from today.

The company said that 10 years after it was set up, and four months ahead of schedule, the "world's most widely used smartphone platform" is now completely free to use.

Symbian claimed that the move from proprietary code to an open source model is the largest in the history of software.

"The development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry, and rapid innovation on a global scale will be the result," said Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation.

"When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open source release of the platform by mid-2010, and it's because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we have reached it well ahead of schedule."

The announcement means that any developer or organisation can use or modify the code and deploy it on a mobile or any other kind of device. Symbian claims to have shipped some 300 million instances of the software.

A total of 108 Symbian packages that contain the source code can be downloaded from the Symbian Developer Library under the Eclipse Public Licence as well as a handful of others. All packages are compatible with the latest version of the platform, Symbian^3.