Nokia and the Future of Symbian

Since Nokia bought out the remaining shares of the Symbian Operating system last week, AND announced that it would be making the platform open source, there has been a whole lot of buzz about what it all portends. There's an instructive analysis of what this all means over at All About Symbian, which merits no repetition here.

There are two items worth watching here, in my view. The first is the comparative value of the Foundation model for mobile platform development. Foundations have been wildly successful in well known examples such as Mozilla and Wikipedia (also more recently applied to the Drupal development initiative), and this might be something instructive to how Mobile Muse functions in the future. We've not thoroughly researched the possibility, but a foundation might be a viable mode of ensuring legacy value (post-2010) for our suite of ever expanding mobile web services. Can a Foundation - as contrasted with the Google-endorsed Open Handset Alliance- provide the best model for software development or not? I think Mobile Muse can learn a lot (and teach a lot) from (and to) these two potentially far-reaching initiatives.

The second watch-worthy item in all this is the conduct of a corporate foundation in the mobile software sector. Given the high expectations from users as to what a mobile internet experience is or should be (given North American audiences' pre-existing acclimatization to a participatory web), what is the role of the ultimate owner of the platform, and how can they ensure that those expectations are met? How will users and developers both adapt to the evolving standards of licensing in this space (e.g., the Eclipse Public License), and how will Nokia or Google measure their benefit from their respective investments? How congruent are the interests of users, developers and corporations in all of this, ultimately?

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