All good comments...even the firey ones
The article, or rather the headline of the article, didn't quite capture the wider context of the discussion and my comments made as a panelist at the Mobilize event in San Francisco last week. In particular, the point that I made regarding the costs associated with developing operating system platforms for mobile phones, regardless of whether it’s Symbian OS based, Linux based or other, was not accurately represented.
GigaOM posted a video of the panel session, which can be found at:
http://events.gigaom.com/mobilize/08/Watch#Platform-Face-Off-The-Economics-of-Development
If you fast-forward 34 minutes into the video, you will see that the point that I was making regarding Linux was not that it is unfit for mobile phones but rather that "fitness" as a concern for mobile handset manufacturers comes down to an issue of license versus labor--you either license a mature mobile platform, such as Symbian OS, which has been purpose-built for mobiles, has shipped on 225+ million phones and has evolved to meet stringent market requirements over the past 10 years, or you invest in the labor required to develop a solution based on Linux, which is a non-trivial investment.
As we prepare for the next exciting chapter in the evolution of Symbian OS, we look forward to delivering a unified Symbian platform to the open source community and making it available royalty-free under the terms of the Eclipse Public License (EPL). As an open source offer, Symbian OS--the most proven, widely adopted, open mobile platform with global industry support--will enable all players throughout the mobile value chain to maximize benefits from economies of scale and thereby decrease development costs.
// Jerry