I'm probably one of the only people on here that doesn't mind this *too* much. Sure, Windows Phone 7 is not an open platform, but everything else about the system seems very nice. It's also got an incredibly nice dev environment.

The only real problem here from a consumer point of view is that Nokia appear to have COMPLETELY abandoned the idea of open source OS based phones. MeeGo had a lot of potential, and it would be great if they could continue this venture while also manufacturing Windows Phone phones, but it doesn't seem as if that will happen.

The problem is, Nokia isn't very good at commitment. They were trying to do too much at once, and they kept abandoning things. They've done it again, only this time, they CAN'T abandon their new direction. This deal will at least keep them somewhat consistent, but equally it could kill the company for good. What will probably happen is that they will become entirely a hardware manufacturer with absolutely nothing unique to differentiate them.

I'm not biased towards open source or closed source, both have their advantages and disadvantages. Yes this is a bad thing from the open source community's perspective, but it's not *necessarily* a bad thing for Nokia. Of course, we all know that the real winners here are Microsoft, no one can argue with that.

By the way, what happened with the whole ChevronWP7 thing... weren't MS supposed to be in some kind of discussions about providing homebrew for WP7? The last thing I heard is that they gave them tshirts.