Symbian no longer open source (UPDATED)

The Symbian operating system is no longer open source, Nokia appears to have confirmed, as developers are now required to register for a licence to access the source code for the smartphone platform.

At the end of March, Nokia made available the latest version of the Symbian code for the first time after the Symbian Foundation ceased operations, and complete control of the platform effectively passed back to Nokia.

Petra Söderling, head of open source for Symbian smartphones, said that Nokia plans to ship at least 150 million Symbian smartphones and to continue software updates for the platform, and that Nokia needed the continued help of development partners to achieve this.

However, in an update on the Nokia Symbian blog, the company has now clarified that it is no longer maintaining Symbian as an open source development project.

"Consistent with this, the Nokia Symbian Licence is an alternative licence which provides access to Nokia's additional Symbian development for parties which collaborate with Nokia on the Symbian platform," the blog states.

Ominously, the blog goes on to say that "we are monitoring the registrations and approving the aforementioned platform collaborators only", which suggests that developers of third-party applications will be denied access to the source code.

The move comes just a year after the Symbian Foundation released the first fully open source version of the platform, and less than two months after Nokia announced it was adopting Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 as its primary smartphone platform in place of Symbian.

UPDATE: Nokia said in a statment to V3.co.uk that the changes should not affect application developers.

"Developers who want to leverage the business opportunity for developing apps for Nokia devices and publishing them through Ovi Store are welcome to work with us at http://forum.nokia.com," the statement said.

07 Apr 2011