Symbian publishes OPL language source code under LGPL

Symbian shows alpha release of OPL for Symbian OS v6.1 at Exposium03

London, UK – 28th April 2003 – Symbian, developer of Symbian OS™, the global industry standard operating system for advanced mobile phones, today announces that it has made its Open Programming Language (OPL) for Symbian OS v.6.0 and v6.1 available to the open source community. OPL is an easy to learn programming environment designed for rapid application development.

At Exposium03, held in London on 29th-30th April 2003, Symbian will demonstrate an alpha release of OPL for Series 60 on Symbian OS v6.1.

By making OPL open source, Symbian ensures OPL will remain the most cost-effective and community friendly programming language. Open source OPL is attractive to a wide range of developers; from Symbian OS licensees wanting to offer an on-device programming language for the hobbyist developer or enterprise developers to tool vendors and to developers committed to open or free software.

The code is licensed under LGPL, the most popular open source license and is hosted on SourceForge.net, the main repository of open source projects. The code can be downloaded from, and developers can participate at
http://opl-dev.sourceforge.net/

Symbian will work closely with the developer community to ensure the success of this project.

"OPL fills a niche for enthusiasts and will help make Symbian OS accessible to a larger number of developers," said Rick Andrews, Senior Technical Consultant, Symbian Ltd, and co-maintainer of the OPL project. "The port of OPL to Symbian OS v6.1 will increase the number of Symbian OS phones capable of running OPL applications."

"OPL has a loyal developer community,” said Hayden Smith, co-maintainer from the developer community. “Making OPL open source will enable developers to commit to its future. I look forward to other developers helping with the project and porting OPL to new Symbian OS phones.

"This is the first step for OPL to be deployed on more Symbian OS versions," said Ewan Spence, OPL documentation maintainer and OPL application developer. "The application is what sells, not the language it was written in. Open source OPL means more applications will be developed and made available, ultimately making Symbian OS phones even more compelling. Some users may even want to develop applications in OPL themselves!"

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About OPL

OPL is a simple, easy to learn programming language. OPL, or 'Open Programming Language, is an interpreted language that requires a translation phase before execution on a Symbian OS phone. To run an OPL application, the OPL runtime environment needs to be installed. This will be available for download although Symbian OS licensees may decide to pre-install the OPL runtime on their Symbian OS phones.

OPL consists principally of the following components:

About Symbian

Symbian is a software licensing company which develops and licenses Symbian OS, the global open industry standard operating system for advanced, data-enabled mobile phones.

Symbian has licensed Symbian OS to the world's leading mobile phone manufacturers including Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson. Publicly announced products based on Symbian OS include the BenQ P30, Samsung SGH-D700, Siemens SX-1, NTT DoCoMo FOMA F2051 built by Fujitsu, Sony Ericsson P800 Smartphone, Nokia 9200 Communicator range as well as the 7650, 3650 and N-Gage.

Symbian has its global headquarters in London, United Kingdom with development sites in Europe and Asia. Symbian’s shareholders are Ericsson, Panasonic, Motorola, Nokia, Psion, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson.

For further information about Symbian, please see www.symbian.com