Last week, I spent a lot of time with the folks from Symbian, the mobile operating system that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) paid $410 million for, only to turn around and donate the assets to an open-source foundation. What I wanted to know was how the employees—who were once programmed to make profits and sell licenses—were adapting to a life as a non-profit, which gave away code and incorporated the intellectual property of others? From the outside, it appears the transition is going well. Over the past few months, the Foundation’s openness has been demonstrated through its blog, which informs people of everything from the move into new offices to the latest software launch. The vocabulary is very deliberate, using words such as “community,” “movement,” and “heart” whenever possible. Developers and outsiders are encouraged to give their opinions, and frequently, Symbian responds with an explanation, even when criticized (I’ll get to that later).

Symbian has no simple task in front of it. This may be the largest open-source endeavor that any one entity has ever attempted. As Nokia executives have said before, it brings together millions of lines of code that companies have invested billions of dollars to create. But the radical decision to open-source the software clearly demonstrates the mounting competition from new entrants, such as Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), the LiMo Foundation, Google’s Android operating system and even incumbent platforms such as Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. In some ways, Symbian had no choice.

The Making Of Open Source: Checking In On The Symbian ‘Movement’ | mocoNews

Rhodes reduces development costs by “up to five times” by eliminating the need to develop similar applications for each mobile operating system (OS), and by using HTML instead of “diverse and complex native device OS languages,” claims Rhomobile. The Rhodes framework supports commonly implemented smartphone capabilities such as GPS, PIM data, and camera functionality, says the company. The Android support was added in time for the final release, adds Rhomobile.

Open-source mobile framework supports Android

Informa Telecoms & Media has released a report saying that Android smartphone sales will outstrip iPhone sales by 2012, based on the idea that “open” handsets will do better than proprietary systems. For the same reason Informa predicts that Symbian’s decline?its share of the smartphone market was 49 percent last year, down from 65 percent the year before?will reverse, with Symbian’s switch to open source helping it maintain its leadership over Android and MS for the next few years reports Silicon.com. “In 2008 almost 162 million smartphones were sold, according to Informa, surpassing laptop sales for the first time. The analyst forecasts smartphone penetration will reach 13.5 per cent of new handsets sold this year but is set to treble by 2013 – to well over a third (38 per cent) of mobile devices.”

mocoNews – Report: Android Devices Set To Outsell iPhones By 2012; Open Handsets To Succeed – washingtonpost.com

What’s unusual is that it is not the handsets themselves that are creating the buzz so much as what is under the hood and invisible to the user, the basic software. Lines are being drawn in the battle for dominance among the three main systems.

Open-source systems battle for market | International Herald Tribune

The year 2008 showed open source — both in the form of Linux specifically and as a software development model generally — coming into the mainstream like never before. When it wasn’t powering new hardware niches like the netbook, it was forming the core of Google’s new Android mobile operating system or its Chrome browser, and sitting at the center of legal wrangling with wide-ranging repercussions.

Top 10 Open Source Stories Of 2008 | Open Source | InformationWeek

That’s how much Symbian earned in royalties last year from sales of its Symbian OS to handset manufacturers, said Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian, who spoke at the Symbian Smartphone Show here on Oct. 21.

Is It Worth Sacrificing $300 Million to Go Open Source?

Nokia goes after Google with open-source Symbian | LinuxWorld