It looks like the folks in Espoo are being more generous. As was reported on Engadget Mobile, Nokia is buying Symbian, the software platform behind its smartphones, and then donating the source code to the Symbian Foundation to further the development of the software in an open source environment. The Symbian Foundation intends on making the code completely open source in the next two years.

An open source Symbian would be more competitive with the Android platform from Google, which took its start as a completely open source initiative. Moreover, with AT&T as a partner in the Symbian Foundation, perhaps that could lead to more handset sales in the United States as Nokia has had very little market penetration on this side of the pond.

For those unfamiliar to Symbian, Symbian is the core platform which runs select handsets from Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and others. Typically, Sony Ericsson adds its own interface on top of Symbian to make it more user-friendly in the form of the UIQ platform. Nokia adds its “S” interface on top of Symbian in such flavors as the S40 and S60 interfaces found in popular devices such as the N95.