The Symbian Foundation has liberated the source code of the Symbian platform's EKA2 microkernel. The code base is now available under the terms of the open source Eclipse Public License (EPL). This is a key milestone in the foundation's plan to open up the entire platform. The group says that it is ahead of schedule and moving forward with its roadmap at a rapid pace.

Symbian is the dominant mobile operating system, but its considerable marketshare is being eroded by emerging competitors with more modern technology. Nokia acquired Symbian last year and began an aggressive campaign to reshape the platform with the aim of opening the source code and adopting the powerful Qt toolkit to serve as the basis for a next-generation Symbian user interface.

During the early stages of the transition, the foundation only made platform source code available under royalty-free terms to its members. The code is being opened up to the general public under the permissive EPL in stages. A number of components were already opened prior to the kernel code release this week. The foundation says that it is on track to have everything in the open by the middle of 2010.

In addition to opening the kernel source code, the foundation has also labored to produce a fairly cohesive development kit that will allow developers to start working with the code and testing it on real hardware. The kit includes an ARM compiler toolchain, an open source emulator based on QEMU, and support for running the OS on the OMAP-powered BeagleBoard. Instructions for building a Symbian environment with a text-based shell are available on the foundation's wiki.

Symbian Foundation developer Daniel Rubio discussed the kernel source code release in a blog entry earlier this week. He emphasized that the kit includes much more than just the kernel source and says that the foundation wants to make it easy for developers to adopt the Symbian kernel in a wide range of different contexts.

"It is time for anyone that has not been exposed to EKA2 before to come out and play at very little or no cost and test the capabilities of the state-of-the-art real time, multitasking, SMP-ready kernel that has, is, and will be shipping in millions of smartphones," he wrote. "This is a major breakthrough for the Foundation that shows our commitment to open source and the wider community while enabling the Symbian ecosystem to make business as usual. We have tried to lower the adoption barrier to a bare minimum, fostering [hardware] innovation and empowering developers to port the platform to all kind of devices."

Symbian's advantages

I spoke with the Symbian Foundation's executive director, Lee Williams, about the announcement. He says that the foundation fast-tracked the process of opening the kernel because it wanted to get it into the hands of developers and hardware makers as soon as possible.

I asked him some questions about the competitive landscape in the mobile market and how Symbian stacks up against other platforms, particularly Linux. He believes that EKA2, as a true microkernel that is heavily optimized for mobile and embedded deployment, offers some compelling advantages over the Linux kernel.

He touts the strength of Symbian's broad and diverse ecosystem. The platform has been deployed on 70 different product form factors, he says, and it supports 53 languages and 300 operator networks. He views Symbian's rich support for native application development as an advantage over Android's Java-based model, and he says that the Symbian Foundation is more inclusive and participatory than Google's Open Handset Alliance.

Google's dominance in the Android ecosystem undermines the Android platform's vendor neutrality and poses challenges for open governance, he says, whereas the Symbian Foundation's technical council gives its members a real opportunity to direct the evolution of the Symbian platform.

Symbian has come a long way in a short period of time, but the foundation still has plenty of work to do if it wants to retain Symbian's historical dominance. Major Symbian backers like Nokia are boosting their commitments to Linux and delivering Linux-based products that outshine their best Symbian-based offerings. Meanwhile, individual mobile application developers are increasingly gravitating towards Apple's iPhone platform. The Symbian Foundation's efforts to overhaul its operating system are very promising, but it will be tough to overcome the perception that Symbian's relevance is in decline. Kernel source code availability is another positive step in the right direction, though.