Symbian open, but not really

Last year, Nokia made news when it revealed that Symbian was going open source and being put under the stewardship of The Symbian Foundation, writes TFTS.

This made some people excited, since Symbian is the most popular mobile OS and modders coming up with cool stuff could of breathed some life into the dying operating system.

Now, however, Nokia has cleared a few things up - it isn't open source. It's just 'open' for business customers, mainly manufacturers.

It appears that Nokia has been receiving a lot of inquires about the 'open source' nature of Symbian. It writes on its Web site: “As we have consistently said, Nokia is making the Symbian platform available under an alternative, open and direct model, to enable us to continue working with the remaining Japanese OEMs and the relatively small community of platform development collaborators we are already working with.”

According to Social Barrel, Nokia has confirmed its decision of taking down Symbian online distributions essentially marked the real culmination of Symbian as an open source mobile platform.

Republishing the code this month did not help either, as the Finnish phone giant said the release was for commercial purposes and under closed source license only, and Japanese phone makers and current partners who still use Symbian was the reason for posting the code online.

For Symbian developers who want to use the mobile platform, an unofficial code dump page of the open source version still exists, but this includes code prior to Symbian Foundation's taking down of the open source version only.

Symbian followers have been unsatisfied with the recent decision since Nokia has reiterated many times that it is open source, even after reproducing closed source code.

The Symbian community, which extends further than immediate collaborators, said the move was disingenuous and forum posters suggested Microsoft was behind the decision to close Symbian, writes PC & Tech Authority.

“Now you're playing the woolly words game again,” wrote one poster in response to Nokia's announcement. “Semantics, shemantics. Your 'open' is a lie. You aren't an enabler. You can't be trusted to keep your own promises.”