The Symbian Foundation has just announced that the source code of their widely used mobile platform is now completely open source.  This makes practically anybody eligible to take, use and modify the code for any purpose, be it for mobile or for other purposes.

For Symbian Foundation, making the mobile phone OS open source  would  provide the Symbian ecosystem with greater potential for innovation, faster time-to-market and the opportunity to develop on the platform for free. This might also attract mobile phone manufacturers to consider using Symbian in their future mobile phone releases.

And as part of  the decision to make their mobile platform open source, Symbian Foundation has committed to share platform roadmap and planned features up to 2011.

So what does this mean for us mobile phone users? Well, if you love mobile phone apps developed on Symbian OS, but does not want to use a Nokia smartphone, soon perhaps this will now be available on other mobile phones.  But that is if mobile phone developers and manufacturers will pick it up and make it available on their mobile devices.

The complete  source code of the Symbian platform is now available for download at the Symbian developer web site. If you’re an applications developer, you can also download the Symbian Developer Kit and also the Product Development Kit. These kits are supported by the latest Symbian^3 platform.

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