Nokia announced its offer to purchase the remaining shares of Symbian Ltd, as part of its endeavor to form the Symbian Foundation.

The official Symbian Foundation announcement was made at a press conference, also webcast, at 10 GMT Tuesday. Nokia is making a cash offer of EUR 3.647 per share, the full sum totalling 264 mil euros or US $410 million.

By being the sole owner of Symbian Ltd, Nokia will then have the leeway to do what it sees fit with the Symbian OS. Hence, the foundation. In a surprise move, Nokia’s pledged to give its Series 60 and the Symbian OS to the Symbian Foundation, with the plan to move towards fully open sourcing Symbian over the next two years. Nokia sees this move as a means to “enable the evolution based on one unified platform”.

Nokia’s got an impressive cadre of supporters with Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and NTT DoCoMo also announcing their intent to join in unifying the Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) into one single platform. AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics,Texas Instruments, and Vodafone have also pledged their support for the Symbian Foundation.

Membership will be made open to all, gratis. The platform will welcome all comers – from hobbyists to device makers.

With the perpetual delays of Android and the looming iPhone juggernaut set to swamp 70 countries, the announcement of the Symbian Foundation could be seen as a means of fending off both Linux and Apple.

While the Symbian Ltd acquisition will likely go through in the fourth quarter of 2008, the Foundation itself will have source code ready to give away only by next year. With proven applications and compatibility with existing phone models, Symbian just might become the Open Source force in the mobile world, and not Android.

Related:

Entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 12:06 pm under Cell phones, Open source.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
Stumble It!