Back at the end of 2009 Samsung announced its own mobile operating system (OS) dubbed bada and the Korean tech giant has since launched many smartphones powered by this OS, achieving some measure of sales momentum around the globe.

Now it would seem that a 2011 report stating that the company will be going open-source with bada this year was right on the money, as Forbes has now revealed that Samsung will be merging the bada code with the new open-source, Linux-based Tizen OS.

Tizen comes with some good backing, since processor giant Intel made the move from MeeGo to Tizen after Nokia hooked up with Microsoft to jump aboard the Windows Phone OS mobile train.

“We have an effort that will merge bada and Tizen,” Tae-Jin Kang, senior vice president of Samsung’s Contents Planning Team stated to Forbes during an interview at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Kang said that this effort has already kicked off.

Once completed, this integration effort will result in Tizen supporting mobile applications that have been created via bada’s SDK (software development kit). This support will also include backwards compatibility for previously published bada apps.

According to Kang, Tizen and bada software developers will have access to the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as well as other software tools (SDKs). The idea behind this move being that seasoned bada developers will be able to easily understand how to go about making Tizen apps as well.

 

In related news Samsung managed to surpass an annual mobile handset sale figure of 300 million units for the first time during 2011. The company makes mobile devices running on a broad range of mobile platforms including Android, Windows Phone OS and bada.