LONDON—As a company, Symbian Ltd. made about $300 million in royalties last year, a revenue stream that will go away in the coming months when the company and its technology is converted into a non-profit, open-source software foundation.
That $300 million is one of the gifts the new Symbian Foundation will make to its members, Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford said Tuesday in a keynote speech at the start of the Symbian Smartphone Show. Instead of spending money to license the operating system, companies can now use it to further their own business, including just banking it, he said.
Another key benefit from the new foundation will be 7 million lines of Symbian code which developers can access for free, Clifford said.
The new Symbian Foundation will be created later this year or early in 2009 when the $410 million acquisition of the Symbian company by Nokia is completed. Nokia announced the acquisition in June, as well as plans to donate Symbian assets to the new foundation. The goal is to turn Symbian, already the most popular smartphone OS, into an open source model that is free to all its members. The foundation’s operating costs are expected to be paid for by its founding members, at least initially.
Clifford said the move to open source will reduce the time to develop new applications and services on Symbian. It also will increase interest not only from mobile developers but all software developers, he said.
“We want developers from all computing and software domains to just come and play,” he said.
Symbian’s goal is to allow anyone to use the OS, with handset manufacturers and/or carriers competing on services and applications built on top of the platform. The foundation also plans to certify these services as a way of keeping the platform from fragmenting.
In addition to Nokia, handset manufacturers using Symbian include Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG Electronics.
Symbian announced at the show that 12 new companies had joined the Symbian Foundation initiative. The original 10 members, announced in June, included AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, ST-NXP Wireless, Texas Instruments and Vodafone. New members include ARM, CieNET, Flander, Fujisoft, Huawei, Inmote, InnoPath Software, Red Bend, Scalado, Symsource, Trango Virtual Processors and Visa.
The company also announced a new tool for developers called the Symbian Analysis Workbench, which can be used to debug applications.