LONDON, UK, 21 October, 2009 - the Symbian Foundation today announced a significant milestone in its plan to move the entire Symbian platform into open source: the release of the platform microkernel (EKA2) and supporting development kit under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

"I would like to congratulate Symbian for not only making the source code of its kernel open source, but also the compiler and simulation environment,' said Andrew S. Tanenbaum, author of global bestsellers and widely regarded computer science texts including, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and Modern Operating Systems. 'The code will be of great interest to programmers and enthusiasts of the Symbian system. It will also show many people that microkernels are widely used in important commercial environments, where both reliability and high performance are essential."

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The complete kit, which can be downloaded from http://tiny.symbian.org/SymbianKernel, consists of:

Open source kernel and other complementary packages
High performance ARM compiler toolchain (RVCT4.0): free to developers and companies of less than 20 employees
Open source simulation environment based on QEMU
Open source base support package for the low cost Beagle Board
Supporting binaries
Hardware execution environment