Symbian Foundation Adds More Companies

June's announcement that the Symbian Foundation would be formed by Nokia and 40 other companies has clearly caught the attention of the mobile software industry. A recent press release by the Symbian Foundation adds the endorsement of additional companies including Opera and Sharp, and the official inclusion of the UIQ branch of the Symbian operating system.

The new companies are:

• Acrodea
• Brycen
• HI Corporation
• Ixonos
• KTF
• Opera Software
• Sharp
• TapRoot Systems
• UIQ (which includes Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and others)

These companies will join with over 40 other companies to continue to create the systems and processes that will govern innovatation, development tools, and marketing for the Symbian operating system and devices that utilize it.

More about the Symbian Foundation

The new Symbian Foundation was announced and created in June to work together to merge Symbian, S60, and UIQ into a single open-source mobile platform. This will make the Symbian OS and the associated user interfaces available to smartphone makers free of charge.

The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch, and will continue to release components of the operating system as open source. These will be made available over the next two years and are intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0. The all new Symbian operating system, based from the work of the Symbian Foundation, is not slated to be released until sometime in 2010.

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