For those who bought Maemo devices because they offer freedom, these aren't good news.

Sure, MS isn't "open" as in "open source". But at least they used to offer a relatively open platform (slowly changing now) that allowed people to have control over their data and hardware.

Google's Android, while offering open code in theory, is a much more dangerous threat to freedom than MS. They pretend to be open, but in fact encourage proprietary licensing and discourage GPLed code. They take all the data they can get, your mails, your contacts, your appointments, your documents, your searches, your location data and so on.

I wouldn't go "ha ha ha" if Google really gains more influence than it already has and overtakes MS in this business.