Nokia's acquisition of Symbian and intent to make the popular operating system open source code changes alignments in the mobile device market. Nokia has now got a lever with which to extend Symbian's reach and make life more difficult for competitors.At heart, it is a defensive move. The iPhone has been so successful that Nokia needs a new arrow in its quiver with which to regain lost ground. Then there's the vague but potentially real threat of Google's Android. What if open source Android one day gobbles up the ground not already taken over by Apple? And in the background there's another potentially potent player in mobile Linux or LIMO.

In looking over its options, Nokia has made one of the few choices available. If the rules of mobile device competition are changing, it's best to change with them. Nokia has found a way to fight back.

It's choice resembles Sun Microsystems' move to make a core technology open source and establish a community of vendors around it, Java and the Java Community Process, although it executed those moves in reverse. The JCP was formed, then years later the technology made open source code. But times have changed. By taking a bold step toward opening up Symbian, Nokia gathers a community of like-minded vendors that will jointly make a greater investment in Nokia's core technology and form a broader front. It will be harder for Apple or Google to penetrate that front, if it adds value for customers rapidly.

The early enlistees in this community are impressive. Ericsson, AT&T, DoCoMo, Samsung, Fujitsu, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Vodaphone, Texas Instruments, and others. Nokia's making Symbian open source offers the assurance that the core technology will always be available to these partners and not be taken off in a proprietary direction without their consent. In this case, the open source move isn't to attract skilled and talented developers from around the world so much as to attract and hold the developers of skilled partners and like-minded competitors. For this purpose, the Eclipse open source license makes sense and Nokia doesn't give a fiddle about the more independent-minded GPL license adherents.

When something becomes open source, it doesn't automatically win in the marketplace or gain fresh adherents. Nor do those who develop with the new open source system suddenly become benefactors of humanity. On the contrary, it's the new opportunities for vendors that count in this case. Nokia is generating an opportunity to compete more effectively with Windows Mobile -- which still costs $6-$8 per device. When will it go open source? It won't. And it levels the playing field for Symbian manufacturers versus their potential open source competition. Sun has shown that defensive open source works, up to a point. Now Nokia is following suit. Defensive open source can even evolve into the more open practices and aggressive distribution that allows some open source products to dominate their commercial competition, let's name the iPhone as the prime suspect there. But beating up on the iPhone, attracting skilled developers from around the world, let's await events and see how skillfully Nokia is able to follow up this opening move.