The Symbian Foundation announced this week that the source code for the platform is now entirely open source software. It is distributed under the terms of the permissive Eclipse Public License and can be modified and redistributed at no cost.

Symbian's path to openness began in 2008 when Nokia, which already owned half of the company, acquired the rest of the shares. In a partnership with other Symbian stakeholders, Nokia launched the independent Symbian Foundation with the aim of building a vendor-neutral ecosystem to advance the platform and facilitate its transition into an open source software project.

During the early stages of the transition, the code remained proprietary but was made available under royalty-free terms to members of the foundation. Last year, the organization began the process of relicensing the platform's source code, starting with Symbian's EKA2 microkernel.

Virtually all of the remaining code has now been opened, several months ahead of the foundation's original schedule. The code has been published in Mercurial version control repositories that are hosted on the foundation's Web server. The foundation will soon be shifting its focus toward community-building efforts now that the code is freely available.

"The announcement that the Symbian platform is now wholly open source represents a unique moment for the mobile industry as a whole. The most widely distributed smartphone platform, the biggest migration from proprietary to open source software in history; delivered 4 months ahead of schedule," wrote Haydn Shaughnessy, editor of the Symbian Foundation's official blog. "Now the platform is free for anyone to use and to contribute to. It is not only a sophisticated software platform, It is also the focal point of a community. And a lot of the foundation's effort going forward will be to ensure the community grows and is supported in bringing great innovations to the platform and future devices."

Although Symbian currently holds global dominance in the smartphone market, the platform is losing a lot of ground to major emerging competitors like the iPhone and Android. The foundation has launched a wide range of technical initiatives to help ensure that Symbian remains relevant. For example, a port of Nokia's excellent Qt development framework will make Symbian application development a lot less ugly. The foundation has also launched an Open Signed Online initiative which will allow developers by bypass the Symbian Signed program when they are testing their applications.

Despite these advancements, building and deploying software on Android is still a lot easier, and it's not totally clear if the Symbian Foundation's best efforts will be able to fully close the gap.