LONDON, UK - The Symbian Foundation delivered on the promised transition to open source of Symbian OS, four months ahead of its scheduled date.

In what is being promoted as the industry's biggest ever contribution to the open source community, the foundation has released 4500 million lines of source code to the open source domain under EPL (Eclipse Public License), making it freely available for developers and handset manufacturers.

The Symbian platform has penetrated into more than 300 million devices, making it the market leader in the mobile operating systems. The source code has been refined and tweaked over the last decade and the present move to open source domain paves the way for increased participation from third party developers and manufacturers in the development of the mobile platform.

The transition to open source was started with Nokia buy-out of the remaining shareholders of Symbian Ltd.  in mid-2008 and announcing the inception of Symbian Foundation, a non-profit organization for development of Symbian as an open source platform. This was seen as a major competitor to the first open source mobile platform, Android from Open Handset Alliance. The Symbian Foundation was functional in early 2009 and the move to open source being completed in just about a year, makes this industry's fastest transition from proprietary code to open source.

In an interview with All About Symbian with Mobile Industry Review, Lee Williams, Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation estimates the source code to be worth US$4.5 billion in intellectual property rights, making it the largest contributor to the open source domain. With the Symbian Foundation adopting the open governance model, it is opening the doors to a wide gamut of industry players and users for innovation and contribution in developing the platform.