This article is more than 1 year old

EU belatedly cancels funding for Symbian OS

All our your money is for talking robopets

The European Commission has cancelled plans to throw €22m of taxpayers' money at Symbian. In November, Eurocrats threw the doomed OS a lifeline by anointing Symbian as the "Embedded Operating System for Europe", in what was called the Symbeose research project.

Real life overtook the decision. Nokia dissolved the Symbian Foundation, reclaimed the code, and end-of-lifed Symbian itself in February, spinning out 3,000 of its own Symbian developers to PwC Accenture.

Critics questioned why, with billions of euros of private money being spent on Symbian, the taxpayer had to add a little more. The mystery remains.

Carl-Christian Buhr, assistant to "digital czar" (European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda) Neelie Kroes, Tweeted that the vanity venture has been halted, with nothing spent.

Engadget reckons the decision shows that "sanity has returned" to EC tech funding. They obviously haven't heard of this. It's utterly, magnificently, barmy. ®

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