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The GPL has been tested in court numerous times, both in the US and in the EU.

Along with the Artistic License, it is actually the only open source license I know of that has been tested in court. It makes sense that there's not much to go to court over with a BSD-like license, but it'd be nice to have the Apache License or the Mozilla Public License tested.

I've studied the EFI API. I know what UEFI is. Do you know what an apologist is? That's you.

You know what a liar is. Check a mirror. You have not been able, in several posts, to give a single reason for UEFI being bad. This means you are a liar. Grow up.

Complaints about Google are for another day, but if Microsoft open sources their mobile OS, I will very much appreciate it.

I see no reason that Microsoft should. Remember, Android is not open source in the way most people think of FOSS. If you want to learn about that, you could for example read this (sorry, only PDF). Making Windows Open Source makes no sense for Microsoft. It makes a lot of sense for Google to both make it seem like Android is FOSS, and also for Google to heavily sponsor Android to get the ad revenue they live off.

Your links both refer to the very same report, by some outfit called "Vision Mobile". Who?

Well, guess who is one of their clients. (RIM) and who is not (Apple).
http://www.visionmobile.com/clients/

You do realise this is PR puff don't you? You didn't actually believe it did you? Hope you're not making any financial decisions. You'd be insane to start developing for Blackberry now.

I can't believe how terrible the mainstream coverage is of the current smartphone news. Why is no one analyzing the real technological battle being waged and the apparent winner, Qualcomm.

Half of the summaries of the announcement simply say that the Ativ S is "dual core," as opposed to I suppose "quad core." What does that mean? I instantly thought, are they using the Qualcomm processor, perhaps even the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4? But then I also knew that since it was a Windows Phone, there is quite the chance it has to be Qualcomm, the one maker Microsoft currently supports.

For this generation of phones, not only is Qualcomm making many of the baseband chips, certainly those for LTE multimode, but they're also successfully selling the entire SoC even in European markets? For Android, Samsung has already had to produce different phones same model Galaxy SIII, one for the US with Qualcomm processors, one elsewhere with its presumably preferred own ARM processor.

Articles such as http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2009/02/nokia-st-ericsson-qualcomm-broadcombye-bye-texas-instrument-and-hello-to-the-new-nokia/ claim that in the previous generation "Nokia was designing the core chipset and letting Texas Instruments finish the integration and physically produce the chips: Nokia has been mastering the whole hardware IP of its phones, and has not been relying on generic chipsets for the vast majority of its production, with all the margins this implies ..." Qualcomm and Nokia settled their lawsuit in July 2008, but look what has happened since then. Now it is Nokia that for the Lumias and presumably for their next generation Windows Phones are having to rely on Qualcomm processors and chipsets.

The mainstream press for some reason has missed the single biggest IP story the past decade, one that has destroyed at least one major company Nokia and has established another Qualcomm as a re-emerging hegemon on a world-wide scale. It should be obvious that if one tries to predict the future, the Chinese at least are not likely to meekly accept a Qualcomm monopoly without somehow getting their own capacity to export similar technology, which then leads one to read about China's TD-LTE ongoing effort, and other companies trying to partner with the Chinese in one last stand against Qualcomm.

There's a lot more going on in mobile IP struggles than what is happening with a certain company with a fruit in its name.

He probably meant if they would switch to Android? Then they would indeed be late.

http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2011/02/the-android-monopoly-and-how-to-harness-it/

But the winners on Android is ZTE, Huawei, HTC, Acer and all the other new players. And then there's the huge giants like Samsung, Motorola, LG and Sony-Ericsson which also fight for their share. But it's a quite level playing field and do they really want to try to compete against the others in price and margins? Who got the most to gain? If Nokia jumped in, late, what would they gain? Would people buy their phones? Probably. Would it be a huge win? Maybe not?

WP is small. Samsung, HTC and LG are probably not that dedicated. At least for the moment. Nokia jumps in? And then what? Who own the market?

I've been following the Meego 1.1 release news (I enjoyed http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/11/the-meego-progress-report-a-or-d/), and have read up on a few other Nokia stories (N8 reviews, rumored N9 devices, etc.) and I don't quite understand what their long run goals with Symbian are. I mostly read bad opinions of it, e.g. Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/14/nokia-n8-review/) loved certain aspects of the N8's hardware but didn't like the software. Symbian is probably the main thing keeping me from getting an N8 (that and the screen is disappointing). Nokia has announced there will be no more high end phones (higher than the N8) that will run Symbian, they will all run Meego. Phones are always getting more capable and I imagine the Meego stack will be optimized going forward, so how many interesting phones going forward are even going to run Symbian?

Given that Meego isn’t ready, I could be a lot more interested in Symbian if Nokia released hardware that they promise will support Meego when 1.2 is released, but for now runs Symbian. I was hoping that would be the case with the N8 since I really like the camera on that phone, and it literally seems to have no competition right now, but I can find nothing online speculating that Meego will ever work on an N8. Going with a transition strategy would let them release more phones even though Meego isn’t really ready (I hope it is ready in Q1, but maybe it won’t be working all that well into Q4 or later.

One more gripe for Nokia - I sure hope they aren’t considering releasing an N9 with a camera that doesn’t match or supersede the N8. The leaks (which could be totally bogus) implied the camera was not as capable (smaller sensor size, no Zeiss, less pixels). What the hell. I’m not going to feel great about spending money on a Meego phone when older Symbian phones can outperform it in ANY area (GPS, call quality, speed, picture/video quality, you name it).

One big plug for Nokia - good job making offline map viewing a key part of Ovi Maps. One of the things I hate about my iPhone (and Android phones I’ve tried) is that getting Google to cache maps seems like a super pain - I don’t want to install third party programs just to be able to use this fancy piece of electronics with huge memory, nice display and a GPS as a stand-alone GPS. It is the main thing that got me to investigate Nokia as an option to move to from iPhone instead of Android. But I’m not really sure I can wait long enough for Meego and Symbian isn’t inspiring enough.

There are two reasons why Nokia won’t be abandoning Symbian anytime soon.

Firstly, Symbian is tightly integrated with Nokia’s variant management process. Nokia is the only OEM that has mastered variant management, i.e. being able to generate 100s of variants (SKUs) at the press of a button. That’s how Nokia can deliver 100s of customised smartphones to operators and retailers around the world. This variant management process is ‘hardcoded’ to Symbian, which means that replacing Symbian would seriously compromise Nokia’s ability to cater to operator requirements around the world and it would seriously hurt its market share.

Secondly, Nokia’s economies of scale rely on in-house control of core components, and the operating systems is one of them. If Nokia were to license Windows Phone it would reduce its differentiation to industrial design and Ovi alone. In the case of Android, Nokia would have to branch Android (and to sustain the cost of Android development), port Qt on Android which means another 12+ months for a stable implementation. While this remains a long-term possibility, it is still a gamble when Nokia’s priority should be to focus on killer devices and not a killer OS. Qualcomm’s BREW MP is another candidate but only when Qualcomm has a good developer platform story and that means waiting for BREW MP to launch a web-based platform akin to RIM’s WebWorks.

Symbian may no longer be a symbiotic system, but will live within Nokia for many years to come as the workhorse under the hood of Nokia smartphones.