Microsoft has welcomed the transformation of the Symbian mobile-phone platform into an open source project, because the software giant contends the change will create a host of new problems for the Symbian community.

"They're opening themselves up to some of the same challenges of all open source projects," says Scott Rockfeld, group product manager for Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business.

Rockfeld sums up those challenges with what some might call the "F word": fragmentation. Fragmenation is bad, he says, because application software developers have to create multiple versions of their code for different operating systems, or different versions of the "same" operating systems. "There are more Linux consortiums that come and go than there are Linux phones," he says.