OStatic

Theory of competition fails in open source, elshewhere. Markets tend to crystallize around a few dominant players.

Oracle opponent cheers delay in mySQL decision. Florian Mueller, a former mySQL shareholder and strategic advisor, says the delay is good.

Droid could bring Motorola back from dead. The Android-based smartphone could revive the company.

Nokia N900: First look. What the Maemo-based phone/tablet is like from the perspective of a Linux geek.

When Nokia announced that it was launching the Symbian Foundation to great fanfare, it had within its grasp that rarest of opportunities to move swiftly and become the dominant open source mobile platform. Alas, just one and a half years later, they have seemingly ceded that position to Android. Instead of recognizing the threat from Android and making strategic changes to counter, they instead criticized Google's closed-door development of Android before releasing a line of code themselves. When criticizing competitors, it helps to have your own house in order first.

?In October, the Symbian Foundation released the Symbian kernel sources to the world, and the rest of the world (read: developers) collectively responded, Great. Where's my Android phone? I've often lauded Google for its ability to fuse the marketing, PR and developer benefits of open source projects into one seemless operation. It would seem that Symbian could stand to learn a few things. The question is, is it too late?

It was well over a year ago now that news of the Symbian operating system--found on approximately half of global smartphones--going open source broke. The news was interpreted as particularly important to Nokia's forward-looking Symbian strategy, but after all this time, an open source version of Symbian's platform is still only in beta testing.

Today, though, as EETimes notes, Symbian has released its platform microkernel, and software development kit (SDK), as open source under the Eclipse Public License. The Symbian Foundation claims that it is moving quickly toward an open source model, which is questionable, but the release of the EKA2 kernel is a signal that Symbian still means business about adopting an open source model.

As GigaOm and this Reuters report note, there is talk that Nokia will show a Maemo phone at next week's Nokia World show in Germany. Maemo, of course, is Nokia's long-standing operating system for its line of Internet Tablets, and is based on Debian GNU/Linux. However, some are interpreting the possibility as yet another sign that Nokia's focus on an open source Symbian OS is wavering.

The Symbian OS has half the global smartphone market, but Reuters quotes Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics as saying: It looks like Maemo, or at least a Linux derivative of some description, will play a key role for Nokia in high-end (products) over the next year or two. If that's true, I have to question Nokia's overall prospects in the smartphone market.

Nokia leaks phone with full GNU/Linux distribution. Unlike Google's Linux platform, Nokia is not intentionally breaking compatibility with real distros.

Open source and healthcare reform: good news and bad. Could open source mess up a truly integrated digital infrastructure for healthcare?

How open source saved enterprise IT. Open source is becoming more like the market that it arose out of.

Open source equivalent applications for the average user. If you were weaned on proprietary Windows apps, what are the free, open source equivalents?

Earlier this week, the Qt Labs at Nokia announced a new project, QtMobility. QtMobility's primary goal is to offer a new set of Qt API development tools for mobile device applications.

While this will certainly make life easier for developers working with the Qt framework on specific Nokia devices, one of the best (and intentional) fringe benefits is that the new API tools are cross-platform. A single application, then, can be built and maintained for any supported Qt platform -- regardless of the mobile device model or manufacturer.