The boldest moves are made from a position of strength, not when the chips are down and you’ve very little to lose. Nokia’s decision, announced today, to acquire the remaining 52 per cent of Symbian it doesn’t already own and make the mobile platform open source, is bold to say the least.
The ambition, says Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, is to create “the most attractive platform for mobile innovation and drive the development of new and compelling web-enabled applications.”
To achieve this, Nokia will join other industry players, initially AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone, to form the non-profit Symbian Foundation, although any company can join.
Together the foundation will unify the Symbian OS with its various competing User Interface layers – primarily Nokia’s S60 and Motorola and Sony Ericsson’s UIQ – into a single open platform for “converged mobile devices”. The new foundation, in which Nokia has the biggest seat since it will swallow up all of Symbian’s current employees, will oversee the process of releasing the new OS under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0 open source license – a transition that will take two years – and become its long-term custodian.
Continue reading »
This isn’t a last100 give-away — we haven’t even got our hands on a review unit yet — but our friend Dan Rayburn 
Buried in Bob Iannucci’s discussion at 
According to the
Last month
There is a reason they call it the dog days of summer. It’s hot. TV is all repeats. Except for blockbuster weekends like Memorial Day and July 4, summer movie releases can be pretty bad. The kids, off school, even get bored watching YouTube.
In a classic DRM U-turn, customers of Microsoft’s now-defunct MSN Music store are being given at least three more years in which they can be sure that the music they’ve purchased will continue to play, even after an operating system re-install or upgrade, and when transfered to a compatible device. That’s because the company, having weathered a storm of negative PR and complaints from customers, has relented on its decision to shut down the service’s verification servers used to implement that store’s copy-protection technology.
There’s a lot to like about