Nokia

Nokia, the blonder-than-you 800-pound Finnish gorilla, has made itself a little acquisition this morning -- Trolltech, the Norwegian software house.

Why is this significant? Well, aside from owning the Qt technology at the heart of KDE, Trolltech also posesses Qtopia Phone Edition, a mostly-open-source linux-based OS for smartphones (sounds familiar).

It's hard not to see this as a response to Android. It is also, without doubt, a big win for Linux, as it seems more and more likely that Linus' open-source kernel is going to become the standard pillar on which the next generation of mobile devices stands.

Nokia has got itself a honey, here. Trolltech has some no-question open source cred, a robust and well-storied software chest, and a gaggle of open source developers already well acquainted with the Qt framework. Furthermore, Trolltech is a LiMo member and producers of their own open handset, the Greenphone, which is more a developer platform and a proof-of-concept than a viable real-world-use device, but is nonetheless cool. And all for a paltry $153 million? Good deal.

[via Engadget]

The most interesting bit of this piece over at The International Herald Tribune is not the it's-not-that-special, it's-just-an-announcement, we-could-have-done-it-too-if-we-wanted-to-but-we-don't rhetoric coming from Nokia. Rather, it's this sentence:

...Google did not invite Nokia to join its Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 companies that includes Motorola, Samsung, and other phone makers.

Now that got my attention. They weren't invited? I, honestly, cannot think of a good reason why not. Let's face it, Nokia is an industry leader because it, for the most part, makes pretty good phones. Maybe it has something to do with Nokia's unrepentant Symbian love?

Maybe it's 'cause Sergey is Russian, and the Russians and the Fins have a tempestuous history? (This is a joke, people, calm down.)

It makes one wonder--was Verizon 'invited'? AT&T (who is, apparently, "in negotiations" with Google)? Was there a method to Google's selection of OHA players? Were they purposefully looking for the second- and third-place carriers and makers (at least in America), who may be more likely to support an industry-changing movement?

From a fanboy's point of view, Linux at the core of Google's new mobile OS is great news. But is Linux really up for this?

There's been much talk in the Linux world over the last few years about "Linux on the desktop". The server space has been fairly locked down for a while now; Linux owns as much market share on the backbone, big-job machines that power the digital world as does the competition. The question, however, of whether Linux is ready for the Desktop - and I mean truly, your-grandma-can-use-it, ready - is still open. From my point of view, here typing this blog post on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon running on a Dell XPS m1330, Linux is all that and more; this is the most satisfying desktop I've ever run. But my friends keep asking me to do stuff that Linux won't do (ie. MSN video chat - "What's Ekiga?" they say), so I have to admit that from a lowest-common-denominator position Linux isn't there, although that has everything to do with market dynamics (Microsoft's stranglehold) and nothing to do with pure ability. But perhaps the next computing movement, which is undoubtedly the mobile phone and embedded systems, will be kinder to Linus' wunderkind?

Or perhaps not. The mobile Linux space has been full of promise for some time, but there's been no delivery. There's Maemo, which powers the Nokia internet tablet line, but as far as I know there are no plans to extend the distro onto handsets. Qtopia was, a year or so ago, full of promise, but Trolltech has recently announced it will no longer produce the Greenphone development platform. OpenMOKO sounds great, but delayed release on the development machines, as well as the notice that it still won't reliably make calls (it's November now; FIC was promising second-gen, mass market handsets by now) makes me concerned that it's a dying horse. Anybody seen anything tangible from LiMo? Palm has been talking about Linux-powered phones for a while now, but the Folio died and the new Centro runs PalmOS.

It's a pretty grim scene, all things considered.

So I have to ask: can Linux really do this? Many big players, including now Google, believe so, and I hope they're right; it would be fantastic vindication for a lot of open source geeks, myself included, if Linux dominates on the next generation of personal computing devices. It would, once-and-for-all, prove the power of the open source model and give the consumers ultimate control over their systems. But I have to wonder if the lack of huge success so far means that success won't ever come.

I'll throw everything I have into supporting Android, 'casue I want Linux on the handset to succeed, but I'm making sure I'm prepared for disappointment.

Is anyone surprised that the other guys are pretending it's no big deal?