Nokia — the pulp-miller cum cellphone powerhouse — made a bold stroke for the Open Source world last week when they announced the purchase of Symbian Ltd. — then gave away its flagship product.

According to the Nokia brass, they'll begin releasing the popular Symbian OS as an Open Source project around the end of this year, under the auspices of the newly established Symbian Foundation. They'll hand over the code in late 2008/early 2009, and plan to offer up everything else by 2010 — all of it under the Open Source Eclipse Public License. As great as that is — Symbian OS is, after all, the market leader for smartphones — one has to wonder how well they've thought this through, given the recent proclamations from Nokia HQ that when it comes to Open Source, they're "not yet ready to play by the rules."