* Nokia to buy Symbian, make it open source

Symbian was spun off from Psion as a way of making it independent, and a number of companies own pieces, including Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Samsung and Siemens. However, Nokia is now offering to buy the 52% of Symbian that it doesn't already own, for €264 million, and says it will make the system open source. Nokia says:The acquisition is a fundamental step in the establishment of the Symbian Foundation, announced today by Nokia, together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone. More information about the planned foundation can be found at www.symbianfoundation.org.One of the reasons for the move is to "to unite Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and [DoCoMo's] MOAP (S) to create one open mobile software platform."According to Symbian's press release:"Establishing the Foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia. "Nokia is a strong supporter of open platforms and technologies as they give the freedom to build, maintain and evolve applications and services across device segments and offer by far the largest ecosystem, enabling rapid innovation. Today's announcement is a major milestone in our devices software strategy." Symbian is by far the world's leading smart phone software platform, with more than 200 million devices sold. Around 18.5 million were sold in this year's first quarter. The move looks as though it's positioning Symbian to compete against Google's Android, and at the same price: free. However, it's hard to know how much of a threat Android represents when there are no Android phones. Motorola has tried hard, but so far, Linux has been a failure in the mobile phone market.