In a move to face increased competition from the Android OS and Windows Mobile, the Symbian Foundation, the group overseeing the development of the world’s most used smartphone OS, has decided to make Symbian a free open source OS.

 

Anyone who downloads the Symbian platform as open source code, consisting of various elements of the Symbian operating system and components such as the user interfaces, will now be able to use and change it to suit their needs, without having to worry about intellectual property.

 

Members belonging to the Symbian Foundation include Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Vodafone and Samsung and according to them, the Symbian OS has already been used in over 330 million cellphones.

 

“This is the largest open source migration effort ever,” Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation told BBC News. “It will increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform.” The development of Symbian is at present largely driven by Nokia, but by open sourcing the OS, the foundation wish to bring down Nokia’s input in the OS’ development to 50% or less by the second half of 2011.