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According to the latest news, the group behind the world’s most popular smartphone operating system – Symbian – is giving away “billions of dollars” worth of code for free. The Symbian Foundation’s announced that it would make its code open source in 2008 and has now completed the move. This means that any organization or individual can now use and modify the platform’s underlying source code “for any purpose”. “This is the largest open source migration effort ever,” Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation stated.

They believe that the move will attract new developers to work on the system and help speed up the pace of improvements. This might increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform.

Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester research, said the move was about Symbian “transitioning from one business model to another” as well as trying to gain “momentum and mindshare” for software that had been overshadowed by the release of Apple’s iPhone and Google Android operating system.