Wow. In case you missed it, Nokia bought up the rest of Symbian (it was already a major investor there) and have united with a number of Symbian stakeholders to form the Symbian Foundation to which Nokia will be contributing the Symbian OS. And from there, they will be working to provide an open source, EPL licensed, version of it.

Wow. We have CDT committers from both Nokia and Symbian and they are a great bunch. I still haven’t figured out whether this is a good thing or not, but it certainly stirs up the pot as far as open source mobile platforms go. I think it also helps secure the future of the Symbian OS as a technology. It’s hard to compete against the hype of Google Android and at the very least this will give Symbian some attention.

It’ll also be interesting to see what kind of community evolves for it. They’ve certainly seeded it with companies that have a vested interest in Symbian’s success. That’ll give them a good start. As we all know in Eclipse-land, it’s a lot of work to grow a community. But maybe growth isn’t the prime objective here. We’ll have to wait and see what the pundits say, but going open seems to be the most popular strategy these days to help ensure sure your platform matters. Mind you that may be the Google-envy speaking 😉