There has been a strange countdown timer running and apparently the reason for said time has now been discovered by the guys over at wired and said reason is the Symbian Foundation plans to make the Symbian operating system completely open source as of today the 4th of Feb 2010.

This is apparently 4 months ahead of schedule and the Symbian source code will now be available to anyone for absolutely free, although it hasn’t been announced just yet but should happen sometime today.

Presumably the Symbian source code will become available to anyone who wants it through the Symbian Foundation website, and the exec director of the Symbian Foundation has said “the dominating operating system out there is Symbian.”

Williams also states that although it may sound similar to Android’s promise, there are major differences as only roughly a third of the Android code base is open, nothing more. Middleware is open while everything else is closed or propriety.