The Symbian Foundation has announced that the mobile OS is now entirely open source, four months ahead of schedule.
All Symbian source code is now available for free under the Eclipse and other open source licenses, the Nokia-led non-profit organization announced.
Individuals or organizations are now free to use the code for any purpose, the foundation said.
“It's increasingly important for smartphone platforms to offer developers something unique. The placing into open source of the world's most widely-used smartphone platform emphatically fits that bill,” IDC analyst John Delaney said.
Symbian was originally set up by a coalition of handset vendors in 1998. Nokia took full control of the operation in June 2008, promising to make it open source.
Nokia’s dominance of the mobile market is threatened by smartphone makers such as Apple and RIM and by open source platforms such as Google’s Android.
IDC predicts Android will become the number two mobile OS after Symbian by 2013.
All 108 Symbian software packages and SDKs are available from the Symbian website.