Everyone (principally Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens, DoCoMo) has decided to sell their shares to Nokia. In turn, Nokia will open source the operating system.
Given the growing mind-share of iPhone and Android with mobile application developers (despite Android's delays), something like this was needed. Symbian, despite its current market share, lacks the coherence of the other two platforms, requiring developers to put in more effort. And more importantly, it lacks the server-side smarts that will really create business value in the mid term. This move gives Symbian a fighting chance, at least, and that has to be a good thing.
One downside I see though... the only company on the list that really has to see this work is Nokia. The rest have or are putting out Windows Mobile devices as well as Symbian (and some are even using Linux). The result: they're backing several horses so they can afford to have one fall. Nokia needs to be careful, it may find that it's new open source allies turn out to be fair-weather friends only.
Additionally, Symbian will need to come up with some server-side service architecture to match Android (with all of Google's services to fall back on) and iPhone (with the app store, and their ingenious 'push notification' service).
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