Nokia’s open source play

I didn’t have a chance yet to write about this due to some recent travel, but better late than never. About 10 days ago, Nokia acquired the remaining 52% of Symbian that they didn’t already own for a cool $410 million. Nokia also announced that they would open source all of the Symbian code. This follows on Nokia’s earlier acquisition this year of Trolltech, the open source GUI toolkit developer, for $153 million.

For those not familiar with it, Symbian is a platform created jointly between Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Psion ten years ago. (Symbian evolved from the EPOC platform created by Psion and was used in handheld computers such as the Psion 5, one of the best portable devices ever.)

Although Symbian isn’t well known in the US, it still has about 60% market share among smartphones, compared to 15% for Windows, 10% for RIM and 7% for Apple. However, given the rapid adoption of RIM and the iPhone, I suspect Symbian’s position in the market was tenuous at best; hence the need for Nokia to do something game changing if they want to hold on to their position. Honestly, it’s pretty rare that large companies are this bold, so hat’s off to Nokia for doing something disruptive while they are still ahead.

While $410 million sounds like a lot (and it is!) Nokia was spending $250 million on license fees anyways. So in effect, they have bought out the license fees and gained full control of their platform.

I’m always leery of joint development consortiums in tech. Most of the time they don’t pan out because of the different goals of the participants. Anyone remember Taligent, Kaleida or iPlanet?

While Symbian never fell victim to the corporate bureaucracy that other joint efforts have, it makes sense for Nokia to control its own fate. Hopefully by going open source, Symbian’s rate of adoption will accelerate. And maybe someday there will be a portable device that has the form factor of the good ol’ Psion 5.