Why not sell the Symbian 60 software rights or make it open source? | Hacker News Reader

Why not sell the Symbian 60 software rights or make it open source?

7 pointshosa7 comments

Disclaimer: Rant incoming;

This is a question I had for YEARS..

Nokia basically has shelved the Symbian 60 OS for many years, not making any devices that run it and not selling it either, so whats up??

Why am I asking this question right now? Because im INFURIATED that today , if I want to buy a basic phone, I am pretty much stuck with weird, cheap experience Chinese software ( sometimes even on good phone hardware) that is always a huge let down compared to Symbian 60.. And I don’t even want to mention the crap cake that is KaiOS...

HMD Global... .. ... Where can I start.. what is it? Where did it come from? Who the hell do they think they are? They are not “global” at all! They wish! It is a joke and a pathetic excuse of a company... and an insult to every person who owned a classic Nokia.. But seriously what is their endgame? Pissing people off? Because thats the only thing I can see.. They don’t care one bit about anything they make, you can observe that very clearly..

> I don’t even want to mention the crap cake that is KaiOS...

Oh please do, its absolutely horrid. How are they even keeping up with Firefox security updates? The only conclusion I could come to, when investigating this, was that they aren't, and when I asked the company in a comment on their public blog how they were handling it they deleted my comment.

I was hoping Lightphone would be a strong contender for a non-smartphone but the reviews so far have been mixed and there seems to be a few serious issues (e.g. battery life), also there's no 2FA which honestly is one of the main things I use my phone for these days (not everything supports hardware 2FA)

Thank you for letting me know about the Lightphone ;)

I'm considering holding out for the Mudita: https://mudita.com/

Though I like Lightphone's aesthetic more.

They did make Symbian open source[1], but I don't think it's still available. And I'm not sure if it was complete. I think when the Symbian Foundation disbanded and Nokia took over (again), they may have done some more work in closed repos.

Possibly here https://github.com/SymbianSource

[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/02/symbian-operating-system-now-o...

I think its a mystery as to why we don’t see Symbian phones from manufacturers that should take advantage of their opensource repository...

Because it's completely obsolete now?

That explains why nobody is making a new Symbian device today, it does not explain why they stopped around 2010.

Nokia apparently abandoned development so they can make windows 7 phones. Android filled the gap, but android was probably an inferior product before Symbian was abandoned.

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