Nokia 770 and the power of grassroot development (read GNU/Linux)

Nokia presented Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and (behold!) it is powered by Linux. Is this a clever move? From my point of view, yes. I’m thinking to buy one, even if I dislike buying gadgets that are not totally useful to me and at the moment I can totally live without a tablet pc. The presentation by Nokia titled “Give and Take: Open Source play for a major telecom manufacturer” presents pros and cons, risks and potentials. I think Nokia was very clever, they are giving a tool to all the GNU/Linux hackers community. The community will play with it happily hacking and (as a by-product) will give back to Nokia (mostly for free) a bunch of incredibly clever applications and ideas that Nokia can embed on its Tablet PC and sell it even more. In fact Nokia is also trying to guide the process, since it has created maemo.org, a development platform to create applications for Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and other maemo compliant handheld devices in the future. Very clever! Will all the Tablet PCs move to GNU/Linux? I hope so but we will see.

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