Nokia puts Symbian out to pasture ... why not release it into the wild?

[silicon_toad2000]

We now know that Nokia management conceded that Symbian couldn't cut the mustard, thanks to years of accumulated userland cruft, by the end of 2008. But it couldn't get Symbian's anointed replacement Maemo/Meego to market quickly enough. So it missed the opportunity of making a managed, orderly transition from Symbian to Linux using Qt as a bridge.

Then, when Stephen Elop CEO announced the partnership with Microsoft, sales of Symbian devices fell of a cliff. Nokia had hoped that Symbian sales would gradually decline over a two-year period: it expected to ship 150 million Symbian phones following the February 2011 strategy shift. Sales of Symbian smartphones at that point were over 25 million per quarter and increasing. But it has barely managed half that.

The OS made its debut in a commercially available product in 1997, giving it a 15-year run on the market, and it has since powered more than 400 million devices, at a rough estimate. Which is not too shabby.

And underneath the crufty UI and bloat, there's still a remarkably reliable, low-power, real-time OS kernel. Nokia could do worse than release it into the wild, where it could spend its final days in really useful little devices.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/19/symbian_maintenance_mode/