Comoditised mobile free software

We've recently reached the point where free software such as GNU+Linux is finally making it's mark in the mobile handset space.

There is a trend, new technology niches need investment and so start off as binary only. When there is increased competition either an open source option will take hold (Apache) or one of the big players will open their source (Netscape, Sun OpenOffice, Trolltech Qt etc) to gain an advantage over their competitors. Also they gain the wisdom of all contributors they gain.

Now we're seeing this in the mobile space, the likes of OpenMoko and more successful Android. Palm also have their webOS distro. They all share a Linux kernel and are built with standard GCC tools.

Symbian is a special case, like Netscape, Sun and Troll they have now also opened up their source code. They've only done this because they are loosing market share like Netscape was. In effect this was something which landed in our lap! I think Symbian could stop the drift of its smartphone marketshare now, but they do need t move away from their own flavours of C++ and cleanup stack, and support a new standard API while deprecating old ones. Like Nokia's newly acquired Qt.. hopefully ;)