Nokia announced today that it “plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own”  and then open the Symbian Foundation along with other device manufacturers such as Sony Ericsson, Motorola, AT&T, LG, and others. The foundation will be open to all developers and "will provide a unified platform with common UI framework” under the royalty-free Eclipse Public License.

The Symbian operating system is currently the most widely used in the world, found on over 50% of “smart mobile device” handsets. This move to open source will place Symbian in competition with Google’s Android platform and the LiMo platform, although only “selected components” will be available at the Symbian Foundation’s launch. The rest of the platform will by fully opened up over the next two years.