Applications are a totally different story though, aren't they? Application developers don't write applications for Nokia; they either write applications for themselves (and publish them just for the fun of it), for the community or for business reasons.

I have no idea what you mean by "nothing written for this community has copyright".

The point with Maemo is that while yes, Nokia takes huge pieces of code that's available for free from upstream projects like Linux, Xorg, GStreamer and such, they invest quite a lot of money to improve this code and push improvements back upstream. (Even if they wouldn't: Putting it all together so that it actually works on a system like the N900 is hard work and certainly doesn't come for free.) - I remember when they told us how one bug they fixed in Linux allowed Palm to launch the Palm Pre without this very bug before the N900... Now tell those people at Nokia that that they get everything for free. BS.

With MeeGo, they went even one step further. While they still have payed Nokia employees working for it, they don't control it as much as they could control Maemo.

From what I can tell, there's a very fair balance of give and take in this whole game. I don't see that much "give" from other cell phone operating systems and their makers.