In a major shakeup Nokia has announced its intention to purchase the remainder of Symbian Ltd to create a non-profit Symbian foundation aimed at turning the OS into a single open source mobile platform.

The acquisition requires Nokia to shell out 264 million Euros for the remaining 52.1% of the organization currently held by Ericsson (15.6%), the Sony Ericsson joint-venture (13.1%), the Japan-based Panasonic (10.5%), the German-based Siemens (8.4%) and Samsung (4.5%).

The new company will combine Symbian, S60, UIQ and NTT DoCoMo’s MOAP(S) into a a single open-source platform creating an environment to encourage rapid innovation in what is already the most popular mobile platform in the world.

The news could dampen excitement in Google’s own ‘open’ Android platform and will have Apple and Microsoft’s ‘closed’ platforms re-thinking strategies perhaps with select components of the Symbian Foundation available at launch and the entire platform available within 2 years.