The carriers should be powerless when it comes to the devices they sell. They should be no more than retailers. Who has ever heard of retailers messing with the products? No one, because that's a crazy idea. Yet that's what the carriers are doing, and will probably do even more with these new operating systems desperate for market share.

3. Why should Nokia back this project up? I mean why specifically them, and not Samsung, HTC, Sony or Huawei? Also there's zero chance they will do it. They didn't back Meego, they killed Meltemi, they aren't backing Sailfish, and they will back Ubuntu? Why? Microsoft would never allow it. And we all know Nokia is just a subsidiary of Microsoft now.

4. One of my biggest problems with Linux in general looking at it from a "consumer" point of view, has always been how ugly the programs look on Linux. They are cringe worthy, and I hate the font, too. I don't know what they're doing here, but I really hope Canonical is serious about design guidelines and resources for developers, much like Apple, Google and Microsoft have done it. They need to make it dead-easy for just about any developer to create beautiful Ubuntu apps at least with the stock resources.

This should be one of their top priorities with Ubuntu, not only on mobile, but on the desktop, too. So I hope they're using resources and design guidelines that will scale well to the desktop, too. And I still think they need to rethink the Unity UI to make it more user-friendly and less frustrating.

Now, I'm all in favor of interoperability requirements and limits on redistribution that infringes on freedom (c.f. automatic patent grants, antitivoization, etc...). But for branding? I just don't see it. If I, personally, am allowed to reskin my Ubuntu device, surely Verizon must be also, no?

That depends on whether or not they distribute it with any of Canonical's trademarks (I'm assuming they have a trademark on Ubuntu, not to mention their own name).

Trademarks are completely independent from (and compatible with) open-source - look at 10Gen, which preserves the rights to the MongoDB name while releasing a product under the GPL.

It's even a doofy idea for car dealers to tack their own logo plaques on the back of your car. Annoying.

I worked very closely with Nokia during that time period. As closely as one could work without being directly employed (we deployed a product directly to the S60 baseline).

What happened at Nokia was the end result of years of engineering neglect. Symbian was a monster. It was poorly engineered in general, and certain subsystems (like messaging) had a reputation for simply being impossible to work with. It was just a huge mess.

The UI saga was just another symptom of that mess. That touchscreen phone referenced in the article? It existed well before the iPhone in various incarnations. They spent years trying to push that thing over the finish line, and failed. The underlying graphical subsystems gave them problems. The new form factors presented by the emergence of touchscreen slate devices proved at odds with a whole host of assumptions made throughout the (huge) Symbian/S60 codebase.

The whole thing was just a giant hot mess.

It's possible that competing internal frameworks could have worked. The ultimate problem is that they never developed one compelling UI paradigm/library that actually worked. Much less worked in a well integrated way across the whole platform.

Nokia failed at project management. They failed at engineering. They failed at leadership.

Now they're just another OEM.

I suspect they've learnt from that and now leave the software side to Microsoft, while leaving them free to focus once again on creating good hardware.

Nokia screwed up, but diverting resources to an even more miniscule market is even crazier.

Instead they should be betting on the web, completely. Ubuntu, being a traditional Linux distro, has a big library of desktop apps that can be cross-compiled in Emscripten, but instead they split their much smaller resources between several different options.

Or are you suggesting that new phone OSes ought to add proprietary non-standard browser extensions in place of a native apps API? Given the ugly history of proprietary browser features it is difficult to imagine anyone taking such a strategy seriously.

So given that, if they were going to put some eggs in another basket, why would they choose Ubuntu over Android, which has an existing application base and at least some user awareness?

It seems like we're at the same stage right now in the mobile OS world as we were in the personal computer market back in the 80s, with multiple competing platforms such as the Amiga, Atari ST, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, PC, Mac, etc. Each had it's advantages, and each had significant success, but there's actually only room in the market for two or three of them long term.

I agree, Android would be a better second bet. But they don't necessarily need to limit themselves to 2 - look at how many options Samsung is keeping open for example.

I would love for this to happen (heck, my N900 and N9 show that Nokia + Linux = fantastic device) but I fear that as long as Elop is at the reins, this is an impossible dream. This is the same CEO who even went so far as to ditch Qt less than a year ago, remember.

The Nokia CEO's a Microsoft loyalist so this is probably not going to happen.