Mannerisms

It's not that one has anything against American products but, when US companies get control of a key industry component, they seem to completely lose their heads and try to use that control to screw the industry for every cent they can extract.

Microsoft has done it with the PC operating system. Intel has done it with PC microprocessors. Qualcomm has done it with CDMA.

In every case the consumer has suffered with the prices demanded by these companies representing an unfair tax on the user.

It seemed absolutely vital for the future of the wireless industry that no American company should get control of the OS used for the mobile internet.

Now Nokia says it will put the Symbian OS into a non-profit foundation and make it a royalty-free, open-source product. This is in keeping with the spirit of the times (assuming you're not an American wannabee-monopolist) and is very much in the interests of the vast majority of the industry and its customers.

Participants in the Symbian foundation are expected to be: Sony Ericsson, Motorola NTT DoCoMo, AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, Matsushita, Siemens and Vodafone.

The Nokia move on Symbian may also be a chance to head off a challenge to Symbian's 60 per cent market share by two other open-source, royalty-free, mobile operating systems:  the Linux-based LiMo Foundation and the Google-backed Android.

If  the open-sourced, royalty-free model of Symbian, Android and LiMo stops Microsoft getting its mobile OS into a significant position in the wireless industry,  that's good news for the wireless industry.

So, if Symbian, LiMo and Android are the way ahead for the wireless industry, that's good news for the wireless industry.