Nokia, the main investor in Symbian, owning 48 percent of the company, has announced that it plans to acquire the remaining 52 percent of the company’s shares and turn it into a non profit foundation.

The new formed foundation will have a board of directors that will be equally divided between the partners of the deal which include mobile phone manufacturers Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericson, Samsung and LG, chip manufacturers Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics NV, and wireless operators Vodafone, AT&T and NTT DoCoMo.

The operating system will be released under a royalty free license and is expected to attract more and more companies to adopt it to run on their devices.

The move is part of Nokia’s strategy of establishing its mobile operating system as the leading one on the market as it faces an increased competition from Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft’s Windows for mobile devices, Google’s soon to be released Android and Research in Motion’s platform for its Blackberry devices, as well as a mobile version of Linux, dubbed LiMo. Google also has plans to develop a set of phones that will run its Android OS. Both Linux’s LiMo and Google’s Android are already open source operating systems.

According to CNet, Nigel Clifford, Symbian’s CEO, has said that the company’s “vision is to become the most widely used software platform on the planet.”

Nokia will pay the other investors of Symbian a price of €3.647 a share, which means that the company will pay a total amount of €264 million, the equivalent of about $410 million, to get complete control over the company. Most of the shareholders have already given their OK to the deal, and Samsung Electronics is still to accept the offer.