If you have or have had a cellphone before the name Nokia will surely ring some bells. The company, that happens to be from Finland, is one of the biggest manufactures of the world and up until recently was trying to figure out what to do with their mobile operating system Symbian.

The platform was released a few years back backed by Nokia but as part of a non-lucrative foundation which always intended to keep the system open source. In recent times, the company started developing an alternative to this software called MeeGo and for a moment it seemed like they were going for both.

Then, something happened and the future of Symbian became unclear, after releasing several versions of the OS, the decided to to develop it any further, and they made a final release early this year with their latest Nseries device.

Soon after that, several phone manufacturers, like LG and Sony-Ericsson that were using the open software as the primary OS for their devices started backing away from Symbian, since Nokia was not going to give any further support to the software.

After tons of information back and forth and with several press releases and blog post by Nokia’s “official” voices, finally it was announced this week that the company will take back Symbian and dedicate resources to future developments of the platform.

But thats not all, they have also decided that the current businesses model for Symbian (which was basically run under a foundation and so on), doesn’t make sense to them anymore and will likely change in the near future in hopes of turning the OS into a more competitive alternative for a growing market.

Up until now, Symbian was distributed under Eclipse, an open source software model of licensing that also meant free, but apparently that will now change and they will change the terms of distribution and who ever wants to develop the platform on their own will have to pay for the right to do so.

All of the above rises (at least) two questions: is this the right move for Nokia, considering that they will keep MeeGo also? Or should tbey just concentrate their effort on Symbian and get back in the ring against other systems like Android or iOS?

Stay tuned…