Nokia Goes Open Source
By Anna Johnson on July 2nd, 2008Nokia, the world’s largest maker of cellphones, plans to make the software that runs its phones available to outside developers.
Nokia will spend 264 million Euro (US $411 million) to buy the shares of Symbian – the maker of software used by 67 percent of smartphones – that it doesn’t already own. Nokia will then turn Symbian into a foundation and make its software available royalty-free to the world’s five largest phone makers — Nokia, Samsung, SonyEricsson, LG Electronics and Motorola. It also plans to offer the software to network operators AT&T Wireless, NTT DoCoMo of Japan and Vodafone of Britain under a similar open-source license.
While the scope of the open source license is currently confined to the companies mentioned above, don’t be surprised if Nokia eventually expands it to include small, entrepreneurial developers. I might be showing my bias here but I reckon small, hungry developers are more likely than large corporates to develop cutting edge applications. And it’s those cutting edge applications that Nokia desperately needs… if it has a chance of beating the iPhone…
Source: Kevin O’Brien, “Nokia to Open Access to Mobile Software”, The New York Times, June 25, 2008
