Nokia pulls a Google

“The real spice in this announcement is that Nokia is stating that it will offer the OS in a more 'open' way,” Carlaw said. “Perhaps this is an admission that the pressure from the Linux industry is really forcing Nokia and Symbian to change their game. Questions remain as to whether the solution will be truly open and what the cost of a Symbian Foundation membership will be.”

At a call with US media today, future Symbian Foundation members shed some light on how open they plan to be. While operating system and UI licenses and development licenses will be open to all, the control over the core technology will be in the hands of a few, at least initially. Symbian executive vice president Jorgen Behrens said final decisions on the evolution of the OS will be made based on merit principles: The opinions of those that contribute the most software will have the most weight. That gives the original contributors of the OS, middleware and user interfaces, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Sony Ericsson and particularly Nokia, a much bigger say in the development of Symbian. As other member companies become involved and make their own contributions, that weighting will shift, Behrens said.

That arrangement may be of particular importance to Nokia as the Symbian Foundation tackles its first major task: incorporating all of the various OS implementations, runtime environments and UI frameworks into a single unified platform. The foundation indicated that platform will be based on the Symbian OS and Nokia’s S60 interface with technological contributions from UIQ and MOAP. While optimizing a Symbian app built for one interface to another probably isn’t that big of a deal, Nokia has spent years and poured millions into developing applications like Nokia Maps and its N-Gage platform to work specifically on S60 devices. A unified smartphone platform based on code originally designed to highlight Nokia’s own applications isn’t going to hurt Nokia by any means.

First, though, Nokia needs to complete the transaction. Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens have already agreed to sell off their stakes to Nokia, which now owns 48% of Symbian. That would give Nokia a 91% ownership stake. The holdout is Samsung with its 9% stake, but considering Samsung has announced plans to join the Symbian Foundation, it doesn’t have much interest in killing the deal. The deal will cost Nokia about EUR 264 million, and Symbian’s employees and operational costs will become Nokia’s. Once the sales get regulatory approval, Nokia expects it to close in the fourth quarter, after which it will transfer all of the Symbian software assets to the Foundation. The foundation is expected begin offering its first free licenses in the first half of 2009.