Symbian Foundation

The Symbian Foundation was a non-profit organisation that stewards the Symbian platform; an operating system for mobile phones, based on Symbian OS, which was previously owned and licensed by Symbian Ltd.. Symbian Foundation has never directly developed the platform, but evangelised, co-ordinated and ensured compatibility. It also provided key services to its members and the community such as collecting, building and distributing Symbian source code. During its operational phase (from 2009 to 2010), it also provided:

• platform development kits and tools
• documentation and example code
• discussion forums and mailing lists
• application signing (Symbian Signed)^[1]
• application distribution (Symbian Horizon)^[2]
• idea gathering and feedback (Symbian Ideas)^[3]
• an annual conference (Symbian Exchange and Exposition, abbreviated "SEE")

The Foundation was founded by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Motorola, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics and AT&T. ^[4] Due to a change in their device strategy, LG and Motorola left the Foundation board soon after its creation. They were later replaced by Fujitsu^[5] and Qualcomm Innovation Center^[6].

Following "a change in focus for some of [the] funding board members", the Symbian Foundation announced in November 2010 that it would transition to "a legal entity responsible for licensing software and other intellectual property", with no operational responsibilities or staff.^[7]. Along with this announcement, Nokia announced it would take over governance of the Symbian platform. Nokia has been the major contributor to the code, and has been maintaining their own code repository for the platform development ever since the purchase of Symbian Ltd., regularly releasing their development to the public repository. ^[8] After the transition completes in April 2011, the Symbian Foundation will remain as the trademark holder and licensing entity, and will only have non-executive directors involved. All Symbian Foundation public web sites, wiki and code repositories were shut down on December 17, 2010^[9], and on that date Nokia launched a new Symbian site^[10].

Members

The Symbian Foundation invited companies to join as members, and attracted over 200, from a large number of categories^[11]:

• Device manufacturers (e.g. Nokia, Fujitsu)
• Financial services companies (e.g. Visa)
• Semiconductor vendors (e.g. ARM, Broadcom)
• Mobile network operators (e.g. China Mobile, Vodafone, AT&T)
• Software companies
• Professional services firms

References

External links

• Official Symbian blog