So, because today’s announcement has consequences for a lot of great FLOSS people, I have felt guilty waiting to see what happens purely for entertainment value. A little bit guilty. Lord knows there’s a metric fuckton of kickarse Open Source jobs out there at the moment anyway!

The Elopocalypse

The gist of the Elopocalypse is that Nokia will team up with Microsoft to use Windows Phone 7 as its primary smartphone platform. No fucking around, Nokia is going all the way: Platform, developer tools, search, advertising, application marketplace, etc.

They are pissing practically everything away into the Microsoft hole. While Nokia has said this as a “new strategic direction”, I think it’s better described as “outsourcing”.

Let us recall the long line of successful and happy Microsoft platform development “strategic partners”: *crickets* (Update: Horace Dediu made a list! In memoriam: Microsoft’s previous strategic mobile partners.)

Under new leadership imported directly from Microsoft, Nokia has chosen the route most damaging to itself in the long term, and most advantageous to Microsoft in the short term.

Most importantly: Who has four fingers and desperately needs a major hardware vendor to ship his brand new smartphone platform? This guy!

MeeGo

What of their Open Source platform ambitions? According to the press release, Nokia intends to continue working on MeeGo and ship a product using it:

Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.

So it sounds like MeeGo will be used for tablets, mobile Internet devices (if that category even exists in 2011) and perhaps other form-factors… but then, check out the choice of words: “project”, “exploration”, “related product”. Elop all but confirmed the loose end nature of the project during the CEO Q&A.

There’s no commonality whatsoever between MeeGo and the Windows Phone 7 platform (unless Nokia do something very clever with Mono, but I can’t see Microsoft allowing it), so now Nokia has Symbian, MeeGo and Windows Phone 7 for different device profiles… a confusing story for developers, don’t you think?

I just buried the lede, didn’t I? Yes, you read that correctly: Nokia has added Windows Phone 7 without dumping any of its platforms, and will continue maintenance of — and ask developers to understand the difference between, and at least a subset of them to embrace — Symbian, MeeGo and Windows Phone 7.

What’s the app store strategy for Nokia MeeGo devices? It won’t be Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace, that’s for sure!

Then you have to consider Nokia’s partners in the MeeGo project: Intel and the Linux Foundation.

Intel have lost their 800lb smartphone hardware gorilla… does it make sense to continue investing in MeeGo? Just for tablets or netbooks? Who else is going to jump on board, particularly since the HP webOS announcement this week?

… and what possessed the Linux Foundation to get into this mess in the first place? So far, no response to Nokia’s announcement from the Linux Foundation, by the way.

Update: A quick thought from Ryan Paul:

I think the Linux Foundation can still salvage MeeGo by making it a generic upstream for low-level embedded Linux stack for set-tops, IVI, etc.

That would probably be worth it for Intel, too — consider Yocto and friends. They’re working hard to build great tools for embedded Linux developers.

Update: Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation has made a statement:

The Linux Foundation is disappointed in Nokia’s decision today to choose Microsoft as the primary platform for its mobile phones. Tough times give birth to difficult decisions that we don’t always agree with, but open source is — at its core — about choice. We believe that open source software is more than a sum of its parts, and the market is currently bearing that out. The Linux Foundation is here to enable collaboration among its members and the Linux community, and we invite participation in MeeGo and any of our other many projects and programs. In its 20th anniversary year, Linux is a significant underpinning in every computing segment. Full steam ahead.

(Yes, that’s the ED of LF saying “open source is about choice”… blërg.)

After not-so-quietly dumping the first MeeGo smartphone, I’ll wager the MeeGo device they’re talking about (rumoured to be shown for the first time at Mobile World Congress) releasing “later this year” will be closer to a “mobile internet device” and the N800 family than a smartphone, even if it can do 3G and voice.

Qt

Now we’re in bat country. Check out Nokia’s letter to developers:

Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same.

Extending the scope of Qt further will be our first MeeGo-related open source device, which we plan to ship later this year. [...] That device will be compatible with applications developed within the Qt framework and so give Qt developers a further device to target.

So let’s get this straight: Symbian won’t be Nokia’s primary smartphone platform, but Qt will continue to be used on it, and (fuck knows why) Nokia still plans to ship Symbian devices. MeeGo won’t be Nokia’s primary smartphone platform (though will continue to be developed for future non-smartphone devices), but Qt will continue to be used on it, and Nokia still plans to ship at least one MeeGo-based device.

“Who’s on first?”

As part of its restructuring, Nokia has returned to having two phone-related divisions: Smart Devices (where the Windows Phone 7, Symbian and MeeGo stuff will happen) for smartphones and presumably other high-end devices of various form-factors and Mobile Phones for the historically large (but now-shrinking) dumbphone market.

There’s always the chance that Nokia takes MeeGo seriously, either as an escape route for the future or for new, non-smartphone devices. The “first MeeGo-related open source device” they plan to ship “later this year” sounds like a “keeping developers happy” play.

But Qt on Symbian might not be the inevitable deathmarch it sounds like… sure, Symbian won’t be the smartphone platform of choice, but it might play a role in Nokia’s attempts to take back the low-end market.

Then again, Nokia has announced that it will help bring Windows Phone 7 down to lower-end devices.

Bottom line for Qt: I would not like to be a Troll today. They’ll be facing layoffs, reduced investment, and for the foreseeable future, life in non-strategic-focus limbo. Unpleasant.

Other options: I can’t see Nokia selling off Trolltech while still relying on Qt for Symbian (although an ongoing development agreement could cheapen the deal). And anyway, who in the Open Source market would want to acquire or poach the core developers?

Intel? Only if their interest in MeeGo survives, and they could just as easily pivot back to GTK+ and/or Clutter (where they have development expertise) given that it was Nokia pushing Qt in the first place.

Canonical? Mark announced only very recently that they’d commit to better Qt support in Ubuntu, mostly for third-party application developers. I can’t see Canonical or any third-party developers being particularly encouraged by Nokia’s decision. I wouldn’t want to second-guess the range of bizarre avenues Mark might pursue, but shovelling money into Qt doesn’t sound like something he’d jump on.

It sounds like a shit sandwich, but there might be a silver lining in this for KDE: Despite never accepting the premise of the criticism, KDE has been stuck under the heel (and on the shifting sands) of Trolltech and Nokia for a long time… could Nokia’s Elopocalypse be KDE’s Independence Day?

Conclusion

I have been a Palm fan for a very long time. My first PDA was a PalmPilot Professional, which eventually led to the m100 (AA batteries!), my first Palm OS phone, Pia’s hand-me-down Tungsten W, the Treo 650 and finally, my last (real) phone: the Treo 680. I’m even vaguely sad that I missed the final outing of Palm OS on the Centro.

I was disappointed when Palm split into two companies, but perhaps it was ultimately a good thing… PalmSource became victim to an almighty corporate Sarlacc, to be digested slowly over a thousand years, while Palm became nimble and determined to win out of necessity.

The ill-fated Foleo was a public relations disaster, but in retrospect, a concept way ahead of its time — consider the explosion of the netbook market soon after, and where the iPad is today (albeit generations of mobile technology beyond the capabilities of the Foleo).

Which brings us to webOS, released a year ago today on the Palm Pre. Having waited impatiently all that time (often running to the emulator to get my fix), I finally acquired one last week.

It is a truly delicious user experience. I won’t go into too much detail on this front — as with most things, you must use it — suffice to say that it carries the soul of Palm OS in a 21st century vessel.

(Okay, one thing on this: When it comes to the basic functions of a smart phone — calls, and contacts — I’m convinced this thing has both the iPhone and HTC’s Sense UI for the Desire beat. Synergy is seamless and awesome.)

Despite it’s youth, webOS is an incredibly promising and fast-moving platform… and in stark contrast to other “mobile Linux” competitors, it’s not just a bunch of goofy shit piled on top of a heavily molested Linux kernel: What runs on your phone is an utterly recognisable Open Source stack and an utterly recognisable web stack. Sure, there’s a layer of proprietary Java gumpf shoved between the good bits, but even that is getting thinner.

To some extent, webOS is the GNOME Mobile platform with a user interface and services layer built for the web generation. It’s D-Bus, GStreamer and PulseAudio under WebKit. Mojo applications, written in JavaScript, talk to services via JSON APIs, and native apps integrate into the web-based user interface via — get this! — NPAPI plugins.

Crucially, webOS will grow and improve along with the web. Everything you’re seeing in the web world — faster JavaScript, hardware accelerated CSS animation, massive growth of the JavaScript ecosystem (consider all the frameworks, CommonJS modules, nodejs event-based server, etc.) and all the incredible new APIs popping up — will find a place in webOS. Check out the Palm Developer Day keynote and podcast from Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith for more on the near future of webOS.

On the awesomeness of Dion and Ben at Palm? I’ll just quote James Governor:

Palm tried to use Apple’s trick of secrecy first rather than investing heavily in developer good will and playing the open card. It didn’t work. Palm realised its error last year and did something incredibly smart – it hired Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith to develop a new, web-savvy, strategy around its platform.

Using open technology as the bricks and mortar of a platform is not particularly amazing of course. Everyone’s doing it. But Palm are making friends and influencing developers by having an impressively open attitude to devices, too. Your store-bought phone — with a bit of Konami code action and the freely downloadable webOS SDK — is already “rooted” for you. Just log in. ps afx? cat /proc/cpuinfo? top? Your “first command” habit is most likely catered for.

That openness has encouraged an incredible amount of community activity. The most Open Source savvy group dedicated to the platform is WebOS Internals. Initially, they published all sorts of juicy information about the innards of webOS and the Pre… but have now rallied around distribution of “home brew” Open Source patches and apps, using their own package management interface, Preware. They’ve even published an updated kernel which supports overclocking, temperature sensors and more advanced power management than the original! It’s wonderful stuff.

Then HP bought Palm.

Despite some messaging hiccoughs (now resolved), this is an incredibly exciting move for Palm and webOS fans. I’m hoping it gives Palm the reach, resources and relationships to go global, accelerate improvement of the platform, and ship some terrific new hardware to make their software shine… that said, it better not be an almighty corporate Sarlacc!

Damn it feels good to be a Palmster.

That’s what I would describe as “the hopes and dreams of a generation” (of Software Freedom lovers), and is the result of fantastic product definition, branding, genuine user excitement, years of incredible — and largely unsung — work of thousands of Debian developers (not to mention all the upstreams)… and a pretty substantial X factor.

Update: Whenever I talk about this chart in presentations, I always follow up with another chart which puts that incredible rising line in context: Ubuntu vs. Firefox. Interestingly, that chart is looking far less impressive today than it was last year. Which is great news… The rise and rise of Ubuntu is catching up to the star power of Firefox! Wow!

At end June 2007, there were 45 businesses in Australia involved in the provision of digital game development services. These businesses employed over 1,400 people and generated a total income of $136.9m which represented an average of $3m per business.

Total expenses incurred for the same period were $128.5m. Almost two-thirds of this amount was attributable to labour costs ($83.8m).

During 2006-07 digital game development services businesses recorded an operating profit before tax of $8.5m, and an operating profit margin of 6.2%.

Compare and contrast.

It has been incredibly satisfying to ship the report, as this project has been with us in various forms for over a year now. The initial concept came together in July 2006, as I was leaving Canonical to join Waugh Partners, and we announced the project in November 2006 at our (thoroughly over-catered) launch party.

We knew that one of the most significant barriers to Open Source adoption in Australia was the perceived lack of support, but that was always counter to our anecdotal understanding of the industry and community here. We needed numbers.

Many thanks to our sponsors, NICTA, IBM and Fujitsu and supporters OSIA, Linux Australia and the NSW Department of State and Regional Development. Without their help, this may have just been yet another small-target, DIY project — no professional face, no industry credibility, and no impact on the wider business community. Instead, we have a serious resource that our industry and community can use to change the game.

… and that’s what Waugh Partners is focused on in 2008: Changing (and sustaining!) the game for Open Source in Australia. This report is just one of the steps we’re taking towards this goal.

Grab the PDF version of the invitation to send to your clients, business associates, local representatives, etc.