Nokia and the battle for open source's soul

As handsets become more commoditised, and as the industry faces up to the likelihood of consolidation, the main differentiating factor is going to be on the application side. That's an arena where the open-source community comes in handy, especially in a world where time-to-market is crucial.

Nokia, which, despite its protestations to the contrary, is effectively seizing the initial stewardship of the SF, understands this better than most companies. Its purchase of Trolltech was specifically geared towards giving it a strong foothold in the application space — both on the desktop and in mobile — and it had already been playing with open source before making that deal.

The Finnish giant had, until now, kept out of the major alliances being formed in the mobile Linux space — the LiMo Foundation and the Google-led Open Handset Alliance (OHA)
— because it could afford to. Enjoying 40 percent of the global handset market, and holding the largest stake in the market-leading Symbian platform, Nokia did not have to be quite as reactive as other manufacturers when it came to the open-source revolution. It was, however, inevitable that it would join the revolution and, after a suitable period of observer status, it chose the right time to do so.

The most serious rival to the SF is the OHA's Android, which theoretically has a significant lead in the race for mobile open source — its first handsets are due at the end of this year or the start of 2009, and the SF will only deliver in 2010.

However, many operators will be wary of Google's explicit dominance of Android, as Google has its own business models and its own agenda  Symbian itself was created by and for the industry, and the SF promises the same levels of industrial collaboration and control.