In a bold move that could end Mobile Linux’ hopes of being the main mobile internet standard, Nokia has taken full control of the Symbian operating system, and introduced a unified software platform and an open source licensing system under the auspices of a new Symbian Foundation. There are 21 founder members, led by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo, and also featuring major operators Vodafone and AT&T; the remaining top five phonemakers, Samsung and LG; and Nokia’s favorite smartphone chip partners, Texas Instruments and STMicro. Nokia will contribute Symbian OS and its Series 60/40 to the new Foundation, while Motorola and Sony Ericsson will give their jointly owned UIQ platform, and DoCoMo will donate MOAP.
This development has the potential to avoid the downsides of Mobile Linux in its current state ‘ fragmentation, lack of a single driving force, unproven technology ‘ while bringing most of the major mobile players together to retain their control of their industry and fight off the challenge from internet players like Google. In other words, the Symbian Foundation will be open enough to suit the needs of the modern mobile industry and developer community, and to counter charges of total Nokia control; but not so open as to lead to confusion and the slow progress epitomized by Google’s admission last week that its Android Linux-based platform is delayed until the fourth quarter.
Nokia’s decision to buy up the 52.1% that it did not already own of the UK-based Symbian company, owner of the leading smartphone operating system, was hardly a surprise. The Finnish giant has always been Symbian’s largest shareholder and most important supporter, and gained a near-controlling stake when it bought out founder Psion in 2004. It paid an estimated $250 million in Symbian license fees last year, and so buy-out made sense ‘ but being Nokia, the motivations are far broader than a cost saving. It will buy the rest of Symbian (from Siemens, Panasonic, Samsung, Ericsson and Sony Ericsson) for about $410 million ‘ on paper a very low price, given Symbian’s revenues ($86 million in the first quarter) and dominant market share in its sector. But the reason for that, and the true nature of Nokia’s ambitions, became clear when the giant announced that it was setting up the Symbian Foundation – with the backing of Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo ‘ and would introduce an open source licensing model for the Symbian OS as well as the S60/S40 and UIQ systems, as well as the other major Symbian-based software platform, DoCoMo’s MOAP. In other words, Nokia will sacrifice royalties from Symbian technologies and its own S60 in the interests of making its chosen platform the leading force in the mobile web, and putting the Linux-based alternatives like Android firmly on the defensive.
The Foundation will make selected components available in open source at launch, and will then work to open source the rest of the platform over the next two years. It will release the software under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0. significantly steering clear of the major open source programs favored by the Mobile Linux and internet groups, notably GPL, as backed by Sun for Java, and Apache, to be used by Android, and the former open source choice of Motorola, which sought to get this adopted as the standard across the mobile industry. Two years ago, Symbian first showed its hand on Eclipse, when it added support for the Eclipse integrated development environment ‘ the most popular platform for Java development in the enterprise, and an open source technology dominated by IBM, but in which Nokia has led the work on a mobile implementation.
Open source licensing represents waters that Nokia first tested two years ago when it put parts of S60 into the open process. At that time, it seemed that the Finnish company might well commit wholeheartedly to open source by porting S60 ‘ by virtue of Nokia’s market share and some third party licensees, the dominant smartphone software framework ‘ to Linux. However, it now seems that Nokia will confine its own Linux activities to its internet tablets. It has stayed out of almost all the Mobile Linux industry groupings, despite its acquisition of open source tools company Trolltech, and now clearly thinks that Symbian has a stronger chance of delivering a viable platform for the mobile web business model than Linux, at least in the short term ‘ and that it stands a better chance of driving the Symbian Foundation, even in open source, than any Linux grouping.
One question, as with any ‘open platform’ where one vendor is a clear leader, is just how open will the Symbian Foundation be? And indeed, how open should it be? Many developers are nervous about an environment as open as the PC Linux systems, because of the danger of fragmentation, and point to the huge control that handset makers have over their particular platforms, compared to PC manufacturers. Most mobile open source initiatives are evolving, at least when they hit the commercial light of day, into the kind of ‘almost-open’ system that Sun and Java had in place for many years before Java went into GPL ‘ with strict limits on any changes to the sourcecode, sometimes effectively amounting to a veto by key technology owners on developer innovations that they regard as risky. The Eclipse process is well accustomed to the measure of control that the enterprise ‘ and the carrier ‘ sectors require even as they embrace the low costs and rapid innovation characteristic of open source.
One model is the hybrid adopted by the LiMO Foundation, the main alternative Mobile Linux initiative to Android. LiMO licenses its APIs to members, royalty-free, using a ‘Foundation Public License’ (FPL), while the kernel and middleware remain under full open source licenses such as the GPL. Like the GPL, the FPL requires that modifications be contributed back on a non-discriminatory basis to all other Foundation members, but it also forbids sourcecode distribution to non-members under any terms. Symbian may well adopt a similar system.
Symbian was originally set up with the vision of uniting most of the major phonemakers behind a single OS, thus attracting developers with a larger potential base and accelerating the evolution of the smartphone market. As attention moved up from the OS to higher software layers such as the user interface, and to unifying technologies like Java, this aim seemed less vital and some early supporters, notably Motorola, fell away, leaving Nokia and Sony Ericsson as the major forces, with their respective user interface and applications platforms, Series 60 and UIQ. Ironically, the new Foundation is reviving those early dreams of consensus among the handset makers, with the two Scandinavians and Motorola joining with NTT DoCoMo as founder members, and Samsung and LG highly likely to lend support.
All this certainly makes sense of Motorola’s recent decision to focus all its high end handset developments ‘ except those for China ‘ on Symbian rather than Linux, the troubled company having all but dumped Symbian a couple of years ago in favor of the open source OS and some Windows Mobile models. Now it has the opportunity to make up for its sad lack of a credible software or mobile web platform for its handsets by taking a starring role in what promises to be the dominant force in internet handhelds ‘ a role prefigured when it agreed to form a joint venture with Sony Ericsson to own and develop UIQ. One of the most significant immediate effects of the new Foundation will be to unify Series 60 with its only real competitor in the Symbian world, UIQ (originally developed by Ericsson and owned by Symbian itself, and later taken over by Sony Ericsson). This will mend a split in the community and so prove more attractive to developers, even though Nokia will feel confident of keeping the upper hand in how the user interface evolves, given the superior installed base and developer forum in place for S60 compared to UIQ.
In the wake of Google’s admission – which cast further doubts over how impressive Android would be in hard commercial reality, as opposed to the marketing world ‘ Nokia’s timing could not have been better to announce its latest move to keep its hand firmly on the rudder of the emerging mobile internet industry (as well as being Symbian’s tenth birthday). This is Nokia at its most daunting ‘ refusing to react to others’ moves, or cling to its own sacred cows, but instead constantly reinventing its business model in order to move the goalposts and stay a step ahead of its rivals. In the vital battle to be the dominant force in the mobile web ‘ commercially and in terms of shaping future standards ‘ the rivals are mainly new ones to the Finnish giant. Under former CEO Jorma Olilla – when the challenge was to establish the mobile device and OS as the internet client of the future, rather than the mobile PC – Microsoft was the enemy. Now that the fight has moved up to the higher software layers and the web services field, Microsoft is sidelined as a serious threat, and can indeed be an ally, with Windows Mobile safely corralled in its enterprise niche and MSN and Internet Explorer under pressure.
Likewise, Apple may be a strong force in web-optimized handsets, but it does not matter too much to Nokia’s web services ambitions, since it is showing every sign of developing the iPhone platform as a closed, high value environment with cult following but relatively little influence on universal standards. Some US analysts chose to present Nokia’s move as a reaction to Apple’s 3G announcements of last month (ignoring the length of time the Symbian deal must have been in the making). In reality, Apple’s handset volumes are a fleabite to Nokia, and the iPhone maker should be more worried about a heavily multimedia-driven platform suddenly gaining almost universal adoption by handset majors, with presumably a large developer community to follow. However, Apple actually has less to fear than Google, because of the strength of its brand and user following, and the fact that it does not aim to make its own mobile web platform a universal standard.
That leaves the Linux-based challengers, led by Google and its Open Handset Alliance, the group of vendors signed up to support Android ‘ but few of which are exclusively devoted to the system. Android is delayed until the turn of the year, at the earliest, as well as being unproven and driven by a vendor with little mobile expertise and ambitions as naked as Nokia’s. Developers will see Symbian as a nearer term profit option, with well tested tools and frameworks, even the enterprise oriented Eclipse. And that may well sway the cellcos ‘ the parties that, as long as they remain the chief channel to market for mobile web services (a very long time), must have the casting vote.
Symbian has gained the ‘big two’ of the mobile internet, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone ‘ the one the most active carrier in defining mobile standards, the latter the largest operator of mobile data services and largest channel for Symbian smartphones. It also has AT&T, which has remained more hesitant about Android ‘ perhaps because of widespread belief that arch-rival Verizon Wireless will support this, and also because its short term mobile web interests have focused on the iPhone. AT&T is important for its size, its ambitious mobile web plans (for which, with its 700MHz purchases, it has spectrum), and for bringing Symbian (and so, indirectly, Nokia) a US partner. This will gladden Nokia’s heart, given that north America is its weakest market, and it could not, of course, attract Verizon or Sprint, since Symbian devices are not CDMA-oriented.
Android has a larger number of committed operators, but few with firm plans, since the platform itself remains shadowy. Some are outside the Symbian community because of being CDMA-based, with Sprint and KDDI the main examples. CDMA is likely to be a Linux stronghold, but this could be a shortlived benefit, as mobile internet operators move from CDMA to LTE (though Linux will be the logical choice for WiMAX, as Nokia’s 802.16e internet tablet bears witness). DoCoMo is an Android member, but its donation of MOAP to Symbian clearly gives it a greater interest in that platform, although it traditionally follows a multi-platform approach, and has shown less eagerness to streamline its operating systems than Vodafone. Other Android backers are T-Mobile USA, China Mobile, Telefonica and Telecom Italia.