Just in time for the Symbian 10th anniversary do, Nokia has announced plans to buy the remaining shares in Symbian and open up the S60 operating system for public use.
Nokia already owns 48% of shares and is set to spend $140 million on the remainder. 91% ofsdhareholders have reportedly agreed so far.
Once the S60 OS is fully under its control, Nokia will hand it over to a non-profit organisation in order to create an open source platform.
This is huge news, and could indicate just how radically the market is going to change with the coming of Google’s open source OS Android.
Although this could be read as Nokia panicking and opening up it’s key OS to get a head start on Google, the open source model has a number of benefits for OS development. Security will undoubtedly benefit from thousands of developers (and hackers) poring over the code, and developers will be free to innovate with new GUIs or other features.
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