Nokia acquires Symbian, plans to make it open source
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Nokia announced that it has bought the bits of Symbian it didn't already own. They intend to make Symbian available as open source within the next two years, probably under the Eclipse Public License. There is a lot of speculation whether this move was prompted by the increasing competition from mobile Linux efforts. Glyn Moody thinks so: "The move is clearly aimed at removing one of the main advantages of Google's Android platform: that it was mostly open source. Now that Symbian goes even further in the direction of openness, some of the attraction of Android will be lost. Moreover, Symbian has ten years of work behind it, is very well known, and is already widely used – none of which is true for Android." While it's not clear yet what the implications will be on the mobile Linux market, it's definitely a big win for open source in general.