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On Tuesday, Nokia not only moved to acquire Symbian for $410 million, it also partnered with mobile-industry giants to launch a foundation to provide royalty-free software and accelerate innovation.
Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo said they intend to unite the flavors of Symbian and create a single, open mobile-software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone, the mobile giants are establishing the Symbian Foundation.
Nokia will make the foundation possible by acquiring the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that it doesn't already own, then contributing its Symbian and S60 software to the foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola will contribute technology from UIQ, and DOCOMO has indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. This lays the groundwork for a platform with a common framework and a royalty-free license.
"Ten years ago, Symbian was established by farsighted players to offer an advanced open operating system and software skills to the whole mobile industry," said Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian. "Our vision is to become the most widely used software platform on the planet and, indeed, today Symbian OS leads its market by any measure."
A Two-Year Countdown
Contributions from foundation members will be integrated to further enhance the platform. The foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.
Symbian powers more than 200 million phones across 235 models offered by multiple vendors. Tens of thousands of third-party applications are already available for Symbian-based devices.
"Establishing the foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia's CEO. "Nokia is a...

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