In a bold move unheard of even in the mobile world, Nokia has bought the remaining shares of Symbian and set up an open-source foundation for developers. Nokia is already the principal owner of Symbian and it dished out $410 million for the remaining shares effectively reducing ten-year-old Symbian to a memory. Symbian will have passed 200 million sales this year and leads all other mobile OS by a wide margin taking 60 per cent of the pie. Other mobile entities will be contributing. Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG Electronics, , STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, AT&T and Vodafone will all be contributing. They are scheduled to release their first phone in 2010. There will be three benefits of making Symbian open source: 1. Nokia will not have to pay licensing fees, 2. it will drive innovation and 3. platform consolidation could speed up product line. All for profit’s sake, I suppose. A super-sleek operation on the platform side is also the best defense against Google’s upcoming Android. But where does Linux Mobile fit in after Symbian becomes fully open source?

[via moconews]