Type | non-profit organisation |
---|---|
Industry | Open mobile software platform |
Predecessor | Symbian Ltd |
Founded | 24 June 2008 |
Founder | Nokia Sony Ericsson NTT DoCoMo Motorola Texas Instruments Vodafone LG Electronics Samsung Electronics STMicroelectronics AT&T |
Defunct | April 2011 |
Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
Area served | Worldwide |
Products | The Symbian platform |
Website | symbian.org |
The Symbian Foundation was a non-profit organisation that stewarded the Symbian operating system for mobile phones which previously had been owned and licensed by Symbian Ltd. Symbian Foundation never directly developed the platform, but evangelised, co-ordinated and ensured compatibility. It also provided key services to its members and the community such as collecting, building and distributing Symbian source code. During its time it competed against the Open Handset Alliance and the LiMo Foundation.
The Foundation was founded by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Motorola, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics and AT&T. [1] Due to a change in their device strategy, LG and Motorola left the Foundation board soon after its creation. They were later replaced by Fujitsu [2] and Qualcomm Innovation Center. [3]
During its operational phase (from 2009 to 2010), it also provided:
The Symbian Foundation invited companies to join as members, and attracted over 200, from a large number of categories: [7]
Following "a change in focus for some of [the] funding board members", the Symbian Foundation announced in November 2010 that it would transition to "a legal entity responsible for licensing software and other intellectual property", with no operational responsibilities or staff. [8] The transition is a result of changes in global economic and market conditions (widely attributed to the stiff competition with other OS such as iOS and Android). Along with this announcement, Nokia announced it would take over governance of the Symbian platform. Nokia has been the major contributor to the code, and has been maintaining their own code repository for the platform development ever since the purchase of Symbian Ltd., regularly releasing their development to the public repository. [9] On 17 December 2010 all Symbian Foundation public web sites, wiki and code repositories were shut down [10] and Nokia launched a new Symbian site. [11]
However that year both Samsung and Sony Ericsson left the Foundation in favor of Google's Open Handset Alliance and the Android operating system, leaving Japan's NTT Docomo as the only major Nokia partner. Then with the announcement of Nokia's partnership with Microsoft in February 2011 and the transition to Windows Phone OS as the primary platform, [12] the development of Symbian stopped and was outsourced to Accenture. [13] Nokia closed this service at end of 2012. [14]
After the transition completed in April 2011, the Symbian Foundation will remain as the trademark holder and licensing entity, and will only have non-executive directors involved.
The Symbian Foundation became legally insolvent, [15] on the 15th April 2022, and it is currently unknown, who the successor organisation, to the intellectual property is.
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, in the greater Helsinki metropolitan area, but the company's actual roots are in the Tampere region of Pirkanmaa. In 2020, Nokia employed approximately 92,000 people across over 100 countries, did business in more than 130 countries, and reported annual revenues of around €23 billion. Nokia is a public limited company listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange. It is the world's 415th-largest company measured by 2016 revenues according to the Fortune Global 500, having peaked at 85th place in 2009. It is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.
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Symbian Ltd. was a software development and licensing consortium company, known for the Symbian operating system (OS), for smartphones and some related devices. Its headquarters were in Southwark, London, England, with other offices opened in Cambridge, Sweden, Silicon Valley, Japan, India, China, South Korea, and Australia.
The S60 Platform was a software platform for smartphones that runs on top of the Symbian operating system. It was created by Nokia based on the 'Pearl' user interface from Symbian Ltd. It was introduced at COMDEX in November 2001 and first shipped with the Nokia 7650 smartphone. The platform has since seen 5 updated editions. Series 60 was renamed to S60 in November 2005.
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The Tizen Association, formerly the LiMo Foundation, is a non-profit consortium which develops and maintains the Tizen mobile operating system. Tizen is a Linux-based operating system for smartphones and other mobile devices. The founding members were Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone. The consortium's work resulted in the LiMo Platform—which was integrated into mobile phone products from NEC, Panasonic and Samsung—and later became the Tizen platform.
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