Hip hip hooray! Day 1 is here. Collecting from various blog posts and press releases from yesterday, the Symbian Foundation is now truly alive and kicking. Congratulations. 

Anatolie Papas confirms: "YES! We are open for business, officially launched, fully operational" Anatolie also hints about a consumer website, to be launched soon.

Also, a blog entry by Tim Holbrow tells us that Nokia has transferred all Symbian related domain names, trademarks, contracts, leases, and some physical assets like IT equipment, furniture etc. over to the Symbian Foundation. The foundation now owns and holds their own assets, occupy their own (leased) buildings, and drink from their own cofee mugs.

Later, a press release announces that some thousands of friends and members of the foundation are beta testing a developer website which includes "platform release information, council charters, wikis, forums as well as access to the SDK, code repository, tools, documentation, wiki, bugtracker and forums." They now have 81 members who will have access to the actual source code of the foundation's first platform, combined mostly from Symbian OS and S60 software platform.

Finally, in the evening Annabel Cooke posts a blog entry on the HEART. I'm about to download a new wallpaper from Flicr, but can't decide if I should go with just one big heart, or the white background image with lots of small things going on. I like them both.

The next step is now to wait for the beta trial to open for public. While most people might wait for access to the Symbian source code, I need to chill the excitement: The code is divided into packages. Some packages will be open source under EPL license from the start, but most of the packages are first distributed to members of the foundation under the foundations's SFL license, and moved under EPL only later. This is because the code in both Symbian OS and S60 platofrm has been incrementally developed over more than 10 years, so they include lots of components and IP that have previously been under a number of different licesing terms. Getting all those IP and licenses under one license takes some time. 

But, eventually it will come. And, the foundation's membership fee is a moderate 1500 dollars so why not join. As the press release says: Members will be entitled to the following, royalty free:

• to license, modify and distribute source code
• to gain access to council meeting plans and deliverables
• to participate in Working Groups & annual member meetings
• be eligible for Board and Council seats
• to foundation support incl. branding, marketing, legal, and business development

Do remember though, you don't have to be a member to access the apps development tools. Apps created for foundation platform will work on hundreds of millions of Symbian based devices. Those tools will open up during Q2.