Today the Symbian Foundation announced that they will be shutting down the websites. The Foundation will now be responsible for licensing software and other intellectual property, such as the Symbian trademark. The development of Symbian will now be taken over by Nokia.

With over 50 million Symbian devices, the Symbian platform remains critical to Nokia and they plan to take over its development. Nokia also plan to have an alternate model for making the platform available to the community which “will be no less open, free and flexible than today's”. The new model will not have a council style governance and will be entirely under Nokia’s control though.

The websites will be shut down on 17th December and the contents (source code, bug database, wiki etc.) are expected to be available in other media like DVD. The Symbian Foundation will no longer host the source code and the source repositories will be shut down along with the rest of the website on 17th December.

Further Readings:

1. Symbian Foundation web sites to shut down

2. 2010-11-24 All councils wrap-up call

[via Hacker News]