Symbian

The Symbian platform was created by merging and integrating software assets contributed by Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Sony Ericsson and Symbian Ltd., including Symbian OS assets at its core, the S60 platform, and parts of the UIQ and MOAP(S) user interfaces.

In December 2008, Nokia bought Symbian Ltd., the company behind Symbian OS; consequently, Nokia became the major contributor to Symbian's code, since it then possessed the development resources for both the Symbian OS core and the user interface. Since then Nokia has been maintaining its own code repository for the platform development, regularly releasing its development to the public repository. Symbian was intended to be developed by a community led by the Symbian Foundation, which was first announced in June 2008 and which officially launched in April 2009. Its objective was to publish the source code for the entire Symbian platform under the OSI- and FSF-approved Eclipse Public License (EPL). The code was published under EPL on 4 February 2010; Symbian Foundation reported this event to be the largest codebase transitioned to Open Source in history.

However, some important components within Symbian OS were licensed from third parties, which prevented the foundation from publishing the full source under EPL immediately; instead much of the source was published under a more restrictive Symbian Foundation License (SFL) and access to the full source code was limited to member companies only, although membership was open to any organization.

In November 2010, the Symbian Foundation announced that due to a lack of support from funding members, it would transition to a licensing-only organization; Nokia announced it would take over the stewardship of the Symbian platform. Symbian Foundation will remain the trademark holder and licensing entity and will only have non-executive directors involved.

On February 11, 2011, Nokia announced a partnership with Microsoft which would see it adopt Windows Phone 7 for smartphones, reducing the number of devices running Symbian over the coming two years. As a consequence, the use of the Symbian platform for building mobile applications dropped rapidly. Research in June 2011 indicated that over 39% of mobile developers using Symbian at the time of publication were planning to abandon the platform.

By April 5, 2011, Nokia ceased to open source any portion of the Symbian software and reduced its collaboration to a small group of pre-selected partners in Japan. Source code released under the EPL remains available in third party repositories.

Symbian is a mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones and currently maintained by Accenture. The Symbian platform is the successor to Symbian OS and Nokia Series 60; unlike Symbian OS, which needed an additional user interface system, Symbian includes a user interface component based on S60 5th Edition. The latest version, Symbian^3, was officially released in Q4 2010, first used in the Nokia N8. In May 2011 an update, Symbian Anna, was officially announced, followed by Nokia Belle (previously Symbian Belle) in August 2011.

Symbian OS was originally developed by Symbian Ltd. It is a descendant of Psion's EPOC and runs exclusively on ARM processors, although an unreleased x86 port existed.

Some estimates indicate that the number of mobile devices shipped with the Symbian OS up to the end of Q2 2010 is 385 million.

By April 5, 2011, Nokia released Symbian under a new license and converted to a proprietary model as opposed to an open source project.

On February 11, 2011, Nokia announced that it would migrate from Symbian to Windows Phone 7. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced Nokia's first Windows phones at Nokia World 2011: the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710. These phones were launched on November 14, 2011. On June 22, 2011 Nokia made an agreement with Accenture as an outsourcing program. Accenture will provide Symbian-based software development and support services to Nokia through 2016 and about 2,800 Nokia employees will be Accenture employees at early October 2011. The transfer was completed on September 30, 2011.

Note: Contents from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian