The Symbian Foundation announced on Tuesday that Sharp Electronics, Opera Software, KTF wireless provider and six other companies have on Tuesday joined the Foundation to help bring open source software and applications to mobile devices more quickly and efficiently. As members of the Symbian Foundation, companies will not have to pay for software developed by its members.

Symbian adds that a total of 40 companies have joined the Symbian Foundation, including most major cellphone makers. The operating system is seen as the biggest and most established competition to Google's Android, which will be ready this fall and is also open-source.

Last week, Symbian made a significant step towards turning Symbian into an open source group, when Samsung agreed to sell its shares in the Symbian operating system to Nokia, the company credited with starting the Symbian Foundation. This followed Nokia's statement in June, when it pledged it would spend $410 million on buying all Symbian shares before contributing them to the not-for-profit Symbian Foundation.

The Symbian Foundation expects to introduce a brand new operating system platform by June of next year but has provided few details.