Head of the S60 Group To Be First Director of the Symbian Foundation

Lee Williams has been nominated to be the Executive Director for the Symbian Foundation.

He can't actually be placed in the post because this foundation doesn't yet exist. It is the organization that will be responsible for making the Symbian OS, S60, and UIQ into an open-source operating system.

Lee is currently head of the S60 organization in Nokia's Devices business, and will stay at his post until the beginning of next year.

He was chosen by the ten initial board members of the Symbian Foundation: AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, ST-NXP Wireless, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

"I feel honored to have been invited to serve in this role", said Lee Williams. "This is a great opportunity to directly help deliver on the promise of the foundation, working with the stakeholders and prospective members who are so committed to make this initiative a success. To me, there can be no more exciting role in the mobile software world than to lead the Symbian Foundation."

How the Symbian Foundation Is Coming Together

In June of this year, the current owners of Symbian Limited decided to take their platform open source.

The steps in this process are:

1. The acquisition of Symbian Limited by Nokia, expected to happen by the end of this year.
2. Software assets are contributed to the Foundation, including Symbian OS and S60 by Nokia, UIQ by Motorola and Sony Ericsson and MOAP by NTT DOCOMO and Fujitsu.
   Note: This software will be available under a royalty-free license to foundation members, expected in the first half of next year.
3. The Foundation will work to unify the platform, with the first release expected in 2009.
4. The foundation will work to make the platform available in open source by June 2010

Since its announcement, 52 companies have announced their support for the planned Symbian Foundation, including eight device manufacturers, seven semiconductor companies, nine mobile network operators, 27 services and software companies and one financial services provider.

More details are available at www.symbianfoundation.org.