Nokia and open source

Nokia makes some  big news announcement

Ok, so they made an announcement they are buying a controlling percent of Symbian, and will be putting it under an open source license. Specifically the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

What remains to be seen is just how much source will be released as open. The EPL  is very generous to proprietary interests. Allowing contributors to relicense their derived works. Which means, "it" won't stay open source. If it is anything like their Maemo offering, it won't be much. Just enough that PR can call it open source. 

Unfortunely, the EPL is not compatible with all the GPL and LGPL works out there, so not very many of the thousands of really great applications for Linux will be available for this. Unless, of course, an application can be relicensed and uses Qt, which will surely be licensed to allow development on this new EPL Symbian.

As with Nokia news lately, I feel it is generally good and it is great to see such a huge company try and be a better 'citizen'.