The result of the pioneering joint Psion and Nokia smartphone effort is still out there on GitHub.
Smartphones are everywhere. They are entirely commoditized now. Most of them run Android, which uses the Linux kernel. The rest run Apple’s iOS, which uses the same XNU kernel as macOS. As we’ve said before, they’re not Unix-like, they really are Unix™.
There have been a bunch of others. BlackBerry tried hard with BB10, but even a decade ago, it was over. It was based on QNX and Qt, and both of those are doing fine. We reported last year that QNX 8 is free to use again. Palm’s WebOS ended up with HP and now runs in LG smart TVs – but it’s Linux underneath.
The most radical, though, was probably Symbian. The Register covered it at length back in the day, notably the epic Psion: the Last Computer feature, followed by the two-part Symbian, The Secret History, and Symbian UI Wars features.
Built from scratch in the late 1990s in the then-relatively new C++, it evolved into a real-time microkernel OS for handhelds, with the radical EKA2 microkernel designed by Dennis May and documented in detail in the book Symbian OS Internals. There’s also The Symbian OS Architecture Sourcebook [PDF]. An official version of the source code is on GitHub, and other copies are out there.
We liked this description from CHERI Project boffin David Chisnall:
Before Nokia was assimilated and digested by Microsoft, it open sourced the OS, and despite some licensing concerns, it’s still there.
It strikes this vulture as odd that while work continues on some ground-up FOSS OS projects in C++, such as the Genode OS, or Serenity OS, which we looked at in 2022,the more complete Symbian, which shipped on millions of devices and for a while had a thriving third-party application market, languishes ignored.
(Incidentally, the Serenity OS project lead has moved on to the independent Ladybird browser, which we looked at in 2023. Work on the OS continues, now community-led.)
Symbian’s progenitor, Psion EPOC32, predates much of the standardization of C++ – much as BeOS did. We’ve seen comments that it was not easy to program, but tools such as P.I.P.S. made it easier. Nokia wasted vast effort on multiple incompatible UIs, which have been blamed for tearing Symbian apart, but none of that matters now: adapt some existing FOSS stuff, and forget backwards compatibility. Relatively few of the apps were FOSS, and who needs touchscreen phone apps on a Raspberry Pi anyway? Qt would be ideal – it’s a native C++ tool too.
Fans of all manner of 20th century proprietary OSes from AmigaOS to OS/2 bemoan that these never went open source. Some of BeOS made it into PalmOS Cobalt but that sank. Palm even mulled basing an Arm version of PalmOS on Symbian, but the deal fell through.
Some of those OSes have been rebuilt from scratch, including AmigaOS as AROS and BeOS as Haiku. But they run on Intel. Neither runs natively on Arm, and yet Symbian sits there ignored. Sometimes you can’t even give the good stuff away. ®
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