The Finnish manufacturer has recently announced that they would like to acquire the remaining 52% of Symbian, and they have offered 264 million euros. Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens have already accepted the offer, which means 91% of the shares, but probably Samsung won't reject the offer either. Besides Nokia's offer of acquisition, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo have also announced that by uniting the Series 60, UIQ and MOAP interfaces they will create a new, uniform, free Symbian interface, without any licensing costs. AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronic, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafonehave also joined the new, non-profit Symbian foundation, but Symbian's current shareholders and leaders have also greeted the initiative. Together with Nokia's acquisition offer, Sony Ericsson and Motorola have announced to contribute to the uniform interface with the UIQ technology, while NTT DoCoMo offered the MOAP standard.
The uniform platform and interface will be available to all members of the foundation without any licensing costs. Members of the foundation will be working together on making the interface as complete as possible. Some components of the platform will be open-source at the moment of their launch, while during the following two years the full platform will be opened, based on the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0. This way Symbian might become the most complete open-source operating system on the market. The success of Symbian, that has been founded ten years ago, is quite obvious, knowing that more than 200 million handsets have been shipped, and tens of thousands of applications are available for the 235 different models. The opening of the operating system proves Nokia's commitment towars open platforms and technologies. Further information about the announcement are available at the Symbian Foundation's official website.
Translated by Szaszati
