TechCrunch IT are reporting that Nokia has bought Symbian Ltd, the software development company famous for creating the proprietary operating system for mobile devices, Symbian OS.

Symbian is the famous operating system that power up most Nokia mobile handsets. This OS was originally developed by Symbian Ltd. but then Nokia claimed it, next to an independent non-profit organization called Symbian Foundation, and implemented it on its devices.

Symbian, the company behind the popular proprietary mobile/embedded operating system of the same name, just turned 10, but it won't see its next birthday. Nokia, which had long owned a substantial portion of Symbian, announced today that it would be buying the rest of the company, 52% for about 264 million euros, or approximately $410 million.

Soon three quarters of the world's smartphones will be running free software.

It was well over a year ago now that news of the Symbian operating system--found on approximately half of global smartphones--going open source broke. The news was interpreted as particularly important to Nokia's forward-looking Symbian strategy, but after all this time, an open source version of Symbian's platform is still only in beta testing.

Nokia announced it plans to acquire all of Symbian, a UK-based mobile phone operating system developer, for £208 million, and will open the software in a move seen as a response to new rival new, Google's Android.

Android will trail only Symbian in mobile phone market share by 2013, according to IDC. Android phones such as the pictured Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, which is now heading for NTT DoCoMo, will grow 150.4 percent to 68.0 million units by 2013, but other Linux-based phones will struggle, says IDC.

In one of the first posts on the Symbian Foundation’s new blog the following proclamation was made about the future of Nokia’s proprietary S60 mobile operating system:
“We’re going to give it all away: For free”.
It’s now almost a year later and I have to ask: What’s taking you so long?

According to a newspaper report, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia plans to equip future high-performance phones with the Maemo operating system. The report (German language link) in the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD), says the company is expected to launch its first Maemo smartphone within the next few weeks.