As any sane person would realise, simply slapping code into the Open Source bucket isn't enough to build an eco-system, and it's good to hear from both John Forsyth of Symbian speaking at OSCON, and Janne Jalkannen (via Nokia Conversations, but speaking on a personal level) that this is point appears to be well understood in the respective companies.
Read on in the full article.
It's interesting to compare Nokia's Symbian phones to their Linux tablets.
As the excerpt says, the Symbian phones have lots of commercial releases written by professional development teams, but very few apps from unpaid enthusiasts.
The Linux tablets on the other hand have virtually no commercially-written apps (there are some exceptions but not many), but they are filled to bursting with open software written mostly by volunteers.
What makes it interesting is that neither platform has got it completely right, on the tablets you end up missing the polished commercial stuff (especially games), while on the phones you miss all the free (as in legally free) niche stuff.
An easy to use software market (perhaps a revamped version of Download) could perhaps help round out the problems of both platforms: it would allow a very easy distribution channel for freeware on Symbian, and something similar would allow commercial software more of a presence on the Linux tablets.
"Open Source Is Not The Only Answer...."
In the same lines of "The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth", some would argue that Open Source is indeed the only answer - it's just not the whole answer. I expect that's what was meant by the title.
read this article it's about predicted symbian/android merger the comments of the developers are more intresting than the article itself i think and they've posted intresting link's to this story
http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nathan-eagles-forum-nokia-blog/business-opportunities-services/2008/07/25/android-symbian-merger-predicted