Has Nokia been known for locking people into a contract with a carrier? I don't know, I'm not from the US and I've never owned a mobile phone. But my impression from reading the comments on this forum is that Nokia doesn't tend to play that game (and some people here say that it has hurt sales in the US)...

It seems to me that a Linux phone would be even less likely to be locked-in than a closed OS system, especially if the whole telephony stack is open, from the modem driver upwards. Looks like the UI is the only thing that won't be open, but we know that from the SDK.





Again, I'm no expert here, and someone will probably point out that it is easy to lock down a phone even when everything is GPL like that...

It just doesn't seem likely that they're going to be locking anything down, considering the direction Nokia is going with Maemo.