Why buy a company just to give away its prime assets the next day? That’s exactly what Nokia is doing, scooping up the remaining 52% share of Symbian and then donating the whole operating system, its associated software and accompanying intellectual property to the newly minted Symbian Foundation. There, a dozen other vendors, operators and developers -- several of whom Nokia is purchasing Symbian shares from -- get to decide its fate.

According to Nokia, it’s really the only way the deal will get done. Consolidating ownership into a single entity and then turning it into a non-profit is a lot easier than the alternative. Five companies besides Nokia own shares of Symbian: Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens and Samsung. Three companies besides Nokia own the software being contributed to the Symbian Foundation: Motorola, Sony Ericsson and NTT DoCoMo. And six additional companies are going to make up the initial governing board of the Foundation: AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

As you can see there’s some overlap between the interested parties, but not much. Negotiating the creation of a non-profit foundation out of that mess of vendors, carriers and chipmakers -- all with different interests and different investments in the technology -- wouldn’t just be difficult but near impossible. So Nokia embraced the "if you want something done…" maxim and took a EUR 264 million plunge.

But why Nokia? This is obviously something a lot of parties want to see happen. How come Nokia has to foot the bill? For the general well-being of the industry? Out of the goodness of its heart? Before we start nominating the Finnish vendor for beatification here, we should probably take note that Nokia has the most at stake in Symbian’s success or failure. Not only does it have the largest financial stake in the OS-developer, but it sells the largest share of Symbian-based smartphones in the world. It sells the largest share of smartphones period. If anyone is going to lead this expedition, it’s going to be Nokia, but just so lieutenants don’t gripe too much Nokia went ahead and financed it, too.

According to the ‘bake a bigger pie’ pop philosophy, all members will benefit. The inclusion of AT&T on the board is a boon unto itself. The operator today sells only a single Symbian smartphone (made by Nokia of course), compared to the dozen or so Windows Mobile devices in every shape in color in its catalog. The Foundation aims to do away with of the differing graphical interfaces and Symbian implementations and create a single integrated platform, giving it far more scale than its separate parts. Here’s where Nokia gets a return on its money. The first implementation on that unified platform will be based on the Nokia’s S60 user interface, ensuring that the years and millions of Euros in development work on S60 engine don’t go out the window with the adoption of some pen-stylus interface.

That seems to imply that Nokia is really just running the show from behind the Foundation curtain, but that assessment may not be entirely fair. Nokia chief development officer Mary McDowell said because of Nokia’s current dominance of the Symbian smartphone market it carries more weight from the get go, but that as other contributors invest more in the platform, Nokia’s influence will diminish. In fact, McDowell said, the board is set up in a way to ensure no single member—no matter how much they contribute to the Symbian source code—can dominate the foundation.

“There is a sort of de facto influence Nokia has due to its contributions to the foundation and the volumes it ships, but when it comes down to a vote on the board, Nokia gets one vote just like the other members,” McDowell said.

E-mail me at kfitchard@telephonyonline.com.