Ari Jaaksi, the vice president of Nokia's MeeGo unit, is moving on to other things. His resignation is an unfortunate loss for Nokia, but it's especially troubling at this time when the Finnish phone giant is working to deliver its first MeeGo-based product.

Nokia's Vice President of MeeGo Devices, Ari Jaaksi, will kick off the afternoon at today's Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit with his keynote at 1:15 p.m. PT. He took a few minutes with us this morning to share what he'll be speaking about and how the MeeGo project is going.

"Linux is the launching pad you need to stand on to be productive," said Nokia's open source director, Ari Jaaksi, at LinuxWorld Wednesday. "We have never managed to bring out a product in such a short time, with so few resources," he added, referring to Nokia's Linux-based Internet tablets.

Check out Nokia’s point of view on What Mobile Users Need and How Open Source Can Help, in the words of Ari Jaaksi. Building upstream following community rules is in the heart of this plan. This is what Nokia has been doing, learning and contributing back a lot. Now it’s time to dive deeper.

Nokia, the new steward of Qt, and Linux kernel contributor, says it has has completed the largest transition from proprietary code to open source in software history.

Nokia announced a home automation system based on the open source OpenWrt Linux distribution. Due in late 2009, the Z-wave wireless radio-equipped Nokia Home Control Center will let users remotely control security, automation, and energy management applications via their mobile phones, says Nokia.

Nokia and Intel have announced a new strategic partnership for mobile development. This is big news for open source, since both Intel and Nokia rely on Linux (and open source) for their respective mobile platforms.

At the same time "both Nokia and Intel were working on separate handset UIs using Qt, the former proprietary, the latter open-source. A better worked example of squandering your leadership role and wrestling yourself to the ground is hard to see."

Trends in computers come in waves. Developers are like surfers on the shore spying out the horizon looking out for the next big one. Today I write about a wave that is just now starting to take shape, looks almost innocuous, but that has the potential to be a great ride as well – Nokia’s Maemo operating system.