Nokia swears allegiance to Linux

The Finnish producer's Internet Tablet, dubbed Nokia 770, is the first device that gave up on the Symbian operating system, in-house developed, and employed Linux solution. With this strategy, Nokia might be looking to get closer to the open source community, which woukd only mean more sales for Nokia.

Yesterday, Nokia announced another important thing: Linux will benefit from all of Nokia's patents and inventions. In an official document posted on the official webpage, Nokia announced that it won't charge any money for its patents.


The litigations related to patents owned by companies are the biggest threat to the development of open-source products. A good example of this is the lawsuit filed by SCO, a software developer, against Unix's developers accusing them of copyright infringement.

This agreement applies only to current or previous Linux versions and doesn't make any reference to the following distributions. The company has announced that it will join forces with the open-source community to identify the cases when the conditions announced yesterday are violated.