Symbian Foundation

The Symbian Foundation is a non-profit foundation announced on June 24th 2008 by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone, to be established to "provide royalty-free open platform and accelerate innovation" with the intent to unite Symbian OS™, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform.

Membership of this non-profit foundation will be open to all organizations. This initiative is supported by current shareholders and management of Symbian Ltd., who have been actively involved in its development.

To enable the foundation, Nokia announced plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own and then contribute the Symbian OS and S60 software to the foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola announced their intention to contribute technology from UIQ and NTT 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.

Contributions from foundation members through open collaboration will be integrated to further enhance the platform. 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.

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