Nope, you mixed the lawsuits up, I think. That happened in the Apple vs. Samsung lawsuit, which is a whole different can of worms. Nokia never demanded anything close to that and the Nokia vs. Apple lawsuit was about cell radio technology licensing in most parts anyway, not so much about any specific shipping product.

Besides and with the caveat that IANAL, as far as I understand it the new product demand by Samsung is kinda weak anyway, because it was done in reaction to Apple demanding to see Samsung products which were already announced and shown to the public or even be on retail shelves already and Samsung wanting to see future unannounced products in counter.

Again, IANAL and I have not watched those lawsuits in great detail, that is just what I gathered. But even I found that to be an odd request from Samsung and I am not sure why they even bothered trying to make that demand.

Well, I want give them some benefit of doubt for now that they still mean right with Android and that they will continue to keep it open enough (although the mentioned reason smells pretty fishy to me).

But I think this is just more strong evidence that Google was caught off-guard with the success of the iPad and rushed Honeycomb to an early release in order to have something to counter Apple.

In my mind, I think Google still was internally trying to limit Android to smaller smartphone-type devices and was still betting on ChromeOS to put on bigger-screen hardware like tablets. So I think Android was never meant to be put on tablets and Google did not want to expand Android to deal with the larger screen estate in a similar way as Apple did.

However, after seeing Apple having such success with the iPad and the carefully expanded iOS for the bigger-screen device, I think they scrambled and rushed Honeycomb together as fast as they could so they could expand Android in a somewhat similar fashion.

Right now, Honeycomb still seems to be buggy and somewhat unfinished, at least from what I gather from the Xoom reviews around the net. Other manufacturers have been slow to roll-out their Android tablets as well and the SDK was released just a few weeks before the Xoom launch, so tablet development for Android has some serious catching-up to do. Those are all good indications about the rushed state of Honeycomb to me

Now delaying the open-source release of Honeycomb in my mind indicates that the source is still a mess right now because it was so rushed and Google wants to delay it in order to stabilize everything and frankly, to remove a lot of embarrassing dirty hacks they put into their code just to get it to a sorta-shipping state.

In summary, I still think that this also shows once more that the simple "Android=Open" and "iOS=Closed" view is nowhere as black and white as some people might think. But right now, I also think this does not signal a strategic shift away from Android being open, but is more of an admission that Honeycomb was rushed to release and Google needs more time to fix its mess.

That is kind of a bummer, although after such a long time of silence, it was certainly quite expected (also, I guess that the Mac version of that game, which was also announced a long time ago, got axed quietly as well).

What I would find more interesting however, would be whether the Unreal Engine 3 itself was ported into a workable state, so it could be used for other porting projects in the future. Because although I do not care too much about the Unreal Tournament 3 game itself, having the Unreal Engine 3 on Linux could at least open some interesting possibilities either for other games being ported or for a developer studio using the Engine in a future game and then doing simultaneous cross-platform development.

Because if you look at the list of games using the Unreal Engine 3, that list of projects is rather impressive (for example, the entire Mass Effect series uses the Engine) and having such a widely used Engine available on Linux would be a boon, I think, maybe even for smaller Indie developers willing to do Linux development (depending on how expensive those licensing terms are).

Technically, porting should be possible, as the Unreal Engine 3 already runs on Windows, PS3, Xbox 360 and even MacOS X and iOS now, so it has shown that it is portable. And before you ask, I am not concluding that because Epic did an iOS port that it automatically runs on Mac OS X as well, although those two share a decent amount of similarities making the jump between those two platforms a good deal easier. No, actually, with Borderlands now having a Mac port, there are already two titles on Mac OS X using the Unreal Engine 3 that I know of (the other one being Star Trek DAC), so there is proof it runs on the Mac. I know that those are only two titles and only one you could possibly call an AAA title, but sadly, as far as I know, that is still more titles available than on Linux :(

So I hope Ryan Gordon at least got the Engine ported, so future projects can use it on Linux. Because although losing the game sucks a little, having the Engine could at least give some hope for some better future developments in Linux gaming. It sure could use some.

I do not think this will elicit a big reaction from Apple. GNUstep is, as far as I know, relatively close to the old frameworks NeXT used in their OS before Apple bought them. Apple then extended and expanded those and made what we now know as Cocoa out of them.

But that was about a decade ago and Cocoa grew and changed a lot during this time. I have not dabbled in GNUstep, but I believe that although there may be some familiarities, nowadays using GNUstep and using Cocoa is a pretty different experience for developers.

For this reason, I also think the summary is way too optimistic: There are already some big differences between developing for the Mac and developing for iOS and those two are at least developed side by side by the same company. The differences between GNUstep and iOS should even be bigger then, making the possible transition not nearly as smooth as the summary might suggest, especially since GNUstep might not even have many APIs for touchscreens and other mobile device-specific stuff yet. I think GNUstep is still pretty much desktop-only as of right now, which makes the Sony decision more than just ... interesting.

What this Sony decision might do, however, is increase adoption of Objective-C as a language. Before now, Objective-C was pretty much confined to the Apple ecosystem, apart from some guys fiddling around GNUstep for fun, I think the language did not have any other commercial venue besides using it on a Mac or on iOS devices (which is a pretty big venue, though). Now, you can also use it to target some Sony stuff as well and maybe, if it proves successful, also gets adopted by some other manufacturers, too. In that sense, Apple might secretly even be pleased that Sony did this, as it promotes Objective-C and gives developers more incentive to learn the language, which might then spur more Mac or iOS development as well.

Well, they are a niche genre for sure, but if done well, they can still be interesting today and actually are kinda coming back again a little.

I think the wave of motion-control systems for consoles played a big part in it, starting with the Wii. Because the Wiimote could essentially be used quite nicely as a modern lightgun system and was standard issue on all Wii consoles, games like House of the Dead: Overkill or Dead Space: Extraction for the Wii were made as rail shooters and now with the Playstation Move rail shooters are now in development for the PS3 as well.

I am not sure how successful those rail shooters are financially, but since the modern consoles gave them some legitimacy back, I think those are good signs that there is definitely interest in rail shooters now.

Well, if you could believe that he actually thinks that way and was not just deliberately stirring the pot in order to hawk his book, Tim Wu, who was mentioned in this slashdot story just two stories below this one, should technically feel very stupid right now for saying the Apple is the greatest danger to information freedom right before Facebook announces this.

At least the guy has impeccable timing in regards to putting his foot in his mouth ;)

Android would be a good example of this, as the company that originally made Android was bought by Google and the founder of that company, Andy Rubin is now overseeing all of Googles Android development.