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Jul. 13, 2009

Late Friday, the Symbian Foundation has officially said it will start open-sourcing its mobile operating system, announcing the release of the Symbian OS security package source code under the Eclipse Public License.

In August 2008, and after acquiring the assets of Symbian Ltd., Nokia said it would open source the company's entire mobile platform, creating the Symbian Foundation in a partnership with Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and AT&T.

The OS' security code is the first package to be moved off the closed Symbian Foundation License (SFL).

There were two reasons why this package was the first to be set free: a practical one and a symbolic one. The practical reason has to do with a specific detail in the export laws of the U.K., where the Symbian Platform source code is actually hosted.

The group trying to export the code ran into some rules that prevented the crypto library source code from being exported when it was covered by the Symbian Foundation License.

"Fortunately," the posting goes on to explain, "there is an exemption for software 'in the public domain', meaning that open source software isn't export controlled, so moving it from SFL to EPL was the most straightforward way to make sure that the complete cryptographic functionality would be available to all."

"We’ve always been open about the design of our platform security mechanisms," the post continues. "Now we’ve started being open about their implementation as well." And, in the true open-source tradition of shared responsibility, it adds: "Cryptographers know how to actually distrust cryptographic algorithm implementations that aren’t open to peer review, so here are ours."

The symbolic reason: Symbian wanted "to demonstrate that we really are serious about providing a dependable platform that is both open and secure at the same time."

Well now the next release will be the Symbian kernel. "While overall security is a extremely relevant feature, we need to target something that will trigger discussions, represent Symbian at the heart, fuel development, engage the non-believer and most of all-- start putting us on equal fighting terms with other available open source platform," reads a blog post from Symbian chief architect Daniel Rubio.

Rubio also said that this would happen around October or November of this year.

"We are working diligently to make this happen in the short term, which in my mind is a three month horizon," added Rubio.

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Source: The Symbian Foundation.