Seems that the text is missing so much context and information for normal person to understand what it is all about. Maybe it's because of how the BusinessWeek article is written? Anyways, in the article in the beginning there is sentence: "the open-source community needed to be 'educated' in the way the mobile industry currently works, because the industry has not yet moved beyond old business models". What is the mobile industry? Why it has not moved? Who is the customer?

Well, unfortunately operators are the customers and the main part of the industry - the drivers for functionality. You are just the end user, "sad bad true". For example, the new iPhone is so cheap because the operators buy them and sell them with discount to those suckers who want it cheap and are willing to tie themselves up with long contracts (read: most of the people).

He's not speaking just about Nokia, he is speaking about the whole field where Nokia is just a small part of the machine; play against the machine and you're out.

As I have understood Nokia has not been customizing phones for US operators and the penalty has been small market share - That is what you get when you do not do stuff for the operators. There is the operator, operator has a music shop, operator does what the music business demands them to do -> drm. "Some of these things harm the industry but they're here [as things stand]. These are touchy, emotional issues but this dialogue is very much needed."

Operators are afraid that some phone manufacturers could direct their business, therefore they take part in Android/whatevercheapfastgood to have freedom from the phone manufacturers.. and of course they want to have their drm there to support their music store.. etc.. It's one really big ship and those turn slow. "As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too."