The Symbian Foundation today completed the open source release of the source code for the world’s most widely-used smartphone platform. The Symbian platform, which has been developed over more than 10 years and has shipped in more than 330 million devices around the world, is now completely open and the source code is available for free. The transition from proprietary code to open source is the largest in software history.

Similar as it may sound to Android’s promise, there are major differences, says Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation. “About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more, and what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary.” Symbian on the other hand is one hundred percent open.

Not only has this come four months ahead of schedule, but also represents ten years of investment and billions of dollars worth of code – all of which is now free to the developer community. This will foster even greater creativity and innovation in the mobile industry, as now any individual or organisation can take, use and modify the code for any mobile device. Today’s announcement also represents the biggest open source migration project ever.

Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the code for any purpose, whether that be for a mobile device or for something else entirely. This strategic move provides the Symbian ecosystem with greater potential for innovation, faster time-to-market and the opportunity to develop on the platform for free. Symbian’s commitment to openness also includes complete transparency in future plans, including the publication of the platform roadmap and planned features up to and including 2011. Anyone can now influence the roadmap and contribute new features.

In case you are wondering, Symbian’s board of directors comprises: AT&T Mobility LLC, Fujitsu Limited, Nokia Corporation, NTT DOCOMO, INC., Qualcomm Innovation Center, Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB, ST Microelectronics NV, Texas Instruments Inc., and Vodafone Group Services Ltd.