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.

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.

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.

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.

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 has bought up the bits of Symbian it didn't already own and is chucking the OS into an open-source foundation along with the S60 UI layer, accompanied by Sony Ericsson and DoCoMo, who are throwing in UIQ and MOAP(S) respectively.

In recent news, the Symbian Foundation announced that "All 108 packages containing the source code of the Symbian platform can now be downloaded from Symbian's developer web site". This is great news!

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?

The Symbian Foundation says the software that powers the most smart phones in the world is being made largely available for free for anyone to use.