In light of new developments surrounding the Symbian Foundation and the Symbian OS, the community-supported open-source code and documentation for the OS will be removed from the foundation’s Websites as of Dec. 17th.

Via an announcement over the weekend on the foundation’s wiki, all of the Websites maintained by the Symbian Foundation will go dark as of mid-December, including sites that contain the source code, kits, wiki, bug database, reference documentation, and Symbian concepts/ideas.  The source code will still be available, but not as easy to acquire.

If you want access to any of the above-mentioned resources, your only option is to contact the Symbian Foundation directly and ask for it on a physical medium (such as flash drive/USB hard drive) sometime after January 31st — including paying the shipping fees.  Gone are the days of the once thriving Symbian community, though it will surely be resurrected in form or anther going forward.

Nokia will no doubt continue to develop the Symbian OS for its own purposes, and nothing is stopping someone else from hosting all the code and documentation going forward on an independent site.  The future state of the first open source mobile OS is anyone’s guess.  Though I don’t see it dissolving completely into irrelevancy, some major decisions need to be made quickly to keep Symbian a viable candidate in a world dominated by iOS and Android.