Symbian Foundation
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| Founded | 24 June 2008 |
|---|---|
| Dissolved | April 2011 |
| Focus | Open mobile software platform |
| Location | |
| Origins | Symbian Ltd |
| Products | The Symbian platform |
| Website | symbian.org |
The Symbian Foundation was a non-profit organisation that stewarded the Symbian platform; an operating system for mobile phones, based on Symbian OS, 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.
The Foundation was founded by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Motorola, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics and AT&T. 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 and Qualcomm Innovation Center.
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:
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. 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.
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