Nokia brands a netbook

All you need is marketing and a supplier. Suppliers are thick on the ground. You can do your business from Taipei and have gear with your name on it coming out of Shanghai within a month.

Nokia is just the latest to follow this strategy. (Picture from CNet's Crave blog.) There is nothing terribly special about the unit being offered -- an aluminum case, an Intel Atom processor, weight under 3 pounds.

So why do it? For the same reason AT&T has former newsman Bill Kurtis sitting in a motorcycle with an HP Mini -- to sell services.

In Nokia's case, it's to sell its Ovi data services, Maps, photo exchanges, data syncing -- sure sounds like PC data. So why not put it into a PC while you work on a handheld people will buy?

It's the connection between hardware and services that makes this story of interest to open source users. Services are the key open source business model. You can't make someone buy a support subscription, but if they are buying the services provided by your software their checkbook is open to you.

This is what Moblin is about, what Android is about, and what Nokia's own open source Symbian is about. Service revenue driving open source adoption.

But it's going to be a multi-corner race among open source, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM. The Netbook gets Nokia into that game. Can open source win it?