Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they plan to establish the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of this unified software platform.

 To enable the Foundation, Nokia today announced plans to acquire the remaining shares in Symbian and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation. The net cash outlay from Nokia to purchase the approximately 52% of Symbian shares it does not already own will be approximately EUR 264 million.

Sony Ericsson and Motorola also announced their intention to contribute technology from UIQ and DoCoMo has also indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. From these contributions, the Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework.

A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free license, from the Foundation's first day of operations.

The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

The Foundation's platform will build on the leading open mobile software platform, with more than 200 million phones, across 235 models, already shipped by multiple vendors and tens of thousands of third-party applications already available for Symbian OS-based devices.

"Ten years ago, Symbian was established by far sighted players to offer an advanced open operating system and software skills to the whole mobile industry", said Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian. "Our vision is to become the most widely used software platform on the planet and indeed today Symbian OS leads its market by any measure. Today's announcement is a bold new step to achieve that vision by embracing a complete and proven platform, offered in an open way, designed to stimulate innovation which is at the heart of everything we do."

Source:cellular-news