Symbian Foundation - Closure of Symbian Foundation

Closure of Symbian Foundation

Following "a change in focus for some of funding board members", the Symbian Foundation announced in November 2010 that it would transition to "a legal entity responsible for licensing software and other intellectual property", with no operational responsibilities or staff. The transition is a result of changes in global economic and market conditions (widely attributed to the stiff competition with other OS such as iOS and Android). Along with this announcement, Nokia announced it would take over governance of the Symbian platform. Nokia has been the major contributor to the code, and has been maintaining their own code repository for the platform development ever since the purchase of Symbian Ltd., regularly releasing their development to the public repository.

After the transition completed in April 2011, the Symbian Foundation will remain as the trademark holder and licensing entity, and will only have non-executive directors involved. All Symbian Foundation public web sites, wiki and code repositories were shut down on 17 December 2010, and on that date Nokia launched a new Symbian site.

However, with the announcement of Nokia's partnership with Microsoft in February 2011 and the transition to Windows Phone OS as the primary platform, the development of Symbian has been decreasing and outsourced to Accenture.