As predicted, Microsoft and Nokia are tying a knot of sorts, and all sorts of people are extremely disappointed by this news. I’m an Android user right now, but I’m particularly disappointed because Android just isn’t the free platform it claims to be.

A lot of people are blaming Microsoft and dreaming up “entryism” conspiracy theories. These people are entirely wrong; the decision to go MS was signalled a long while ago by Nokia’s board. Nokia are a $40B business: decision making doesn’t work like that. What is true, though, is that occasionally the free software community gets the benefit of large corporations putting resources into developing software, and occasionally those corporations change their mind later. We celebrate the former and mourn the latter, it’s only natural – I’m a big GNOME fan, but it seems that GNOME Mobile, MeeGo, and the various related stacks are basically dead in the water at this point.

This match-up makes a huge amount of sense for Nokia, but sadly it is going to alienate some of their current user base. I liken this to Bob Dylan’s move to electric guitar: his fan base called him a sell-out, and never ever forgave him. Fundamentally, his music changed beyond all recognition. Whether this is right or wrong, of course, lies in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.

Amusingly, this also means that of all the development platforms for native mobile apps, Mono is now exceptionally well-placed. It can compile native code and make full use of native APIs, and comes in an Apple flavour already, with Android along the way. I guess this is an additional sting in the tail for some, particularly since Qt could have also played that role exceptionally well, but we must acknowledge that the free software mobile development stack is actually in quite good shape right now. We don’t have the right development environment for HTML5 apps yet, though.

It’s exceptionally sad that a really free mobile OS hasn’t come to fruition. OpenMoko took a long time to come to market and wasn’t developing quickly enough, that same verdict has now been given on MeeGo. Android is close, but is not developed in an open fashion and in the matter it is delivered is not a free OS. The “commoditization” argument has been shown to be wrong.

What the move to WP7 does signal is strong integration into Windows and, I guess, Exchange and Sharepoint. People aren’t going to care about the OS in a couple of years. For free software to matter in this space, the focus has to be on integration and apps. It doesn’t matter, after all, what’s running the hardware: what matters is what you can do with it. By struggling for freedom at the hardware and OS level, it’s very easy to lose sight of the bigger picture – and with it, strive for things which are totally irrelevant to 99.99% of phone users.