Wow! This is a shocker. Nokia has bought Symbian several months back with the intent of open sourcing the mobile operating system and using it in its next generation of touch screen based mobile phones. The acquisition cost about 400 million USD and from what I’ve read Nokia is considering to dump the mobile platform in favor of it’s Linux based Maemo open mobile platform. Maybe it’s the reason that leaked info about the next generation N900 Rover tablet is getting a 3.5 radio chip built-in.The mobile operating system’s age is turning out to be the main reason Nokia is considering dumping Symbian OS. I think another show stopper in this scenario that isn’t mentioned on the TechCrunch article is that it’s actually pretty hard to turn a closed sourced operating system like Symbian to an open source project. There are lots of places in the source code that you’ll have to deal with intellectual property and licensing issues especially if the code was developed by an entity outside of Symbian.
Of course, I am all for it if Nokia decides to just focus on the Linux based Maemo. This will give the mobile world another open mobile platform that is based on Linux. And just imagine the amount of software that you and I will be able to run on the mobile phone if this pulls through. Already Maemo users have that benefit. If it goes mainstream, we’ll be seeing a lot of Linux based mobile phones in the market — cool!
