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.

The Symbian Foundation today announced a significant milestone in its plan to move the entire Symbian platform into open source: the release of the platform microkernel (EKA2) and supporting development kit under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

The Symbian Foundation expects its web sites to be shut down on the 17th of December. The source code for the Symbian operating system will continue to be available on the open source organisation's site until then. Thereafter, it will only be available on request

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.

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.

Following their announcement back on the 4th of February, 2010… Symbian has released the first fully open source version of their mobile operating system, the Symbian^3 (S^3) platform.

The Symbian Foundation will make Symbian as an open-source operating system in 2010 and will put out its first distribution of software for developers in the first half of next year.