Nokia and Symbian to become one; royalty-free, open source roadmap

http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2008/06/nokia-and-symbian-to-become-one-royalty-free-open-source-roadmap/


- The foundation will be open to all on a low $1,500 yearly fee from 1H09. Being a foundation member gives you rights to access, modify and contribute foundation source code, access meeting minutes and documents, participate in working groups and annual member meetings.

- Sony Ericsson and Motorola (whatever its fate is) should be adopting S60 and dropping UIQ. That’s a major change, especially for Sony Ericsson who had built 6+ current phone models on UIQ. It’s also a sign for lay offs at UIQ who had been building a team of nearly 400 people in Ronneby and Budapest [update: UIQ will be laying off 200 out of 375 staff]

- DoCoMo should be replacing MOAP with S60, again a major undertaking for Fujitsy, Sharp and Mitsubishi who had shipped over 60 models to date on MOAP.

- Unlike LiMo, the Symbian Foundation will be controlled by a single player, Nokia, based on the weight of its code contributions its ownership of Symbian and the shipment-based assignment of board seats. This governance model is effectively similar to the Open Handset Alliance which is controlled by Google and the WebKit browser core development, which is owned by Apple (although the underlying mechanisms are quite different)

- If Android signalled the commoditisation of the mobile operating system business, the Symbian Foundation platform is the nail in the coffin. This will make things rather challenging for many Linux stack vendors (especially those targeting the smartphone market) who charge on a royalty basis. I expect to see revenue models move towards professional services fees from certification, customisation and productisation (see earlier post on open source business models).

Firstly, as a royalty-free, open source licensed OS, Android was too hard to resist for any OEM. Nokia’s acquisition of Symbian is essentially the answer to Android, resonating the same core principles which are
a) royalty-free
b) open source licensing for pooling costs of maintaining a commoditising OS and
c) majority ownership by a single player