It is great to read that Nokia now fully owns Symbian, a huge player in the mobile device OS field (runs on Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Erricson devices), and established the Symbian Foundation to release the OS under the Eclipse public license. It will be interesting to read these public license terms in detail.This move by Nokia may have been influenced by Google's recent acquisition of Android, which is a open source based operating system for mobile phones. Nokia may not have wanted to wait and watch Google become a dominating pressence in the mobile phone industry by becoming the developers of the mobile platform of everyone's choice. Google's main desire is to have more people using Google, and they see mobile handsets as another viewing platform. They would like to use the open OS to make handsets to connect to mobile networks in the same manner that computers connect to the Internet. They feel that there should be a general neutrality about the specific underlying hardware. This is not the same in the current mobile landscape, with handsets strongly tied to carrier. Just think of the iPhone and Rogers (and AT&T down south). A great and lengthy article can be found at Wired Magazine.
