MAKATI City, Philippines -- There is a good and bad side in the move to make Symbian royalty-free, local and foreign developers said.

"In the short term, it doesn't change much as Nokia was already a majority owner of Symbian," said Albert dela Cruz, platform strategy manager of Microsoft Philippines, when asked for comments on the news.

Nokia has announced it would buy the remaining shares in Symbian and make the company's mobile operating system royalty-free for rival phone makers Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG Electronics and Motorola.

Becoming royalty-free also means doing away with fees developers need to pay when creating applications that run on Symbian OS (operating system).

"In the long term, they open themselves up to the same challenges that other open source operating systems have encountered," said Dela Cruz who is an open source advocate for Microsoft Philippines.

"In contrast, Microsoft has taken an open platform approach (open standard APIs, no royalties from developers, etc?) helping original equipment manufacturers and developers innovate on top of Windows Mobile to differentiate their offerings and create a great experience for our mutual customers. This approach keeps the platform more consistent for developers and customers," Dela Cruz said.

Elmar Gomez, chief operating officer of wireless application provider Mobile Arts, for his part, said the decision of Nokia to make Symbian royalty-free might reduce costs to developers and eventually consumers.

"This is encouragement for us to develop on the Symbian platform. But how much less will it cost us? It has to be substantial like greater than 50 percent. We are not doing anything on Symbian but I read that the cost of Symbian per phone is about $5. Not much," Gomez added.

Greg Wilkins, an Australian open source advocate and expert, said Nokia's move is meant to stir the market "to get developers to create for their software" and therefore making it better.

Wilkins believes that Nokia is not fully embracing the open source software philosophy because this move will eventually "funnel into Nokia."

Wilkins is founder of open source companies Mort Bay Consulting, Core Developers Network and Webtide, where he is currently the chief technology officer.

Market analysts see Nokia's move as strengthening Symbian's hold on the mobile operating system market against Apple and Google.

"Fragmentation within the software platform market is the biggest single barrier to mobile data services and revenues," said Adam Leach, analyst for research firm Ovum.

Symbian is also competing against the LiMo Foundation which is similarly espousing an operating system based on an open source model.

Leach said the creation of the Symbian Foundation reflects the fact that Symbian's competitive landscape has started to change rapidly over the past year with the entry of new players like Google's Android and Apple.

Despite 206 million mobile phones carrying it, Symbian has not established itself as an industry standard, Leach said.

"This was due to a number of factors but a crucial part of this was Nokia's ownership of Symbian and OEMs being reluctant to license key software components from their biggest competitor."