@anon coward 2,4,8,16 royalties ...
>I must be missing something here, but aren't all these years-of-royalty calculations >missing the point that Nokia has payed the 'royalty advance' but still needs to pay the >salaries of all their new Symbian employees? Previously they handed out the cash and >Symbian distributed (much/some of) it to the staff.
I believe Nokia has been looking for good developers, technical architects etc. as they are continuing to grow ... this way they have increased their development team by over 1,000 people without having to do a single interview, read a single CV or pay a recruitment firm ...
... previously Symbian (after starting with big cash injections from all the partners) has been making a profit on royalty payments and so has been paying their own staff, putting cash in the bank and reinvesting in expansion (hiring new people, opening new offices, buying in technology etc.) ... so yes, I expect this will cost Nokia something ... but it's also an investment (as is buying most companies) that Nokia reckons is going to make it money ... I'm sure they think having more developers and a single UI (plus the open source aspects) will mean they will be able to get new phones out quicker/cheaper and with the features people want .. and so they'll sell more phones (or as Nokia seems to ilke calling them "handheld devices/multimedia computers/mobile devices" ... and many of the big handset manufacturers reckon that higher functionality mobile devices (camera/email/web/phone/maybe TV/mp3 player) is the growth area of the market (people who just want "a phone" are paying very little for such, and there's lots of competition, so there's not a lot of profit unless you can sell many many millions of them, as Nokia have done and will probably continue to do with S40) ... but the bigger profit is there in mid-range and feature phones. And that's where the Symbian Foundation OS will come in.
>Or maybe they don't plan on having any new symbian developers, since the delighted >and enthusiastic open source community will be doing all the future work.
Could be! But as the open source isn't coming until 2010, I think Symbian employees will probably have a job until then :-)
>Actually, is there going to be any open source, or just a royalty free platform?
You really need to read other things than just The Register. Symbian Foundation initially will be providing a royalty-free platform for foundation members (currently costs $1,500 to join) and is committed to releasing an open source version (once everything has been combined in and the various IP is sorted out) in, I believe, 2010 ... it's all on the Symbian Foundation website ...