This is the first time I heard this outside my own mind. Considering all the creepy NSA surveillance crap and how easily American companies fall victim to this, combined with how a Microsoft executive took down Nokia, sold the scraps and went back to Microsoft, this scenario is entirely possible.

Before Elop crashed a weak Nokia they still had lots of options and they were developing modern phones. They even could have made a phone for the simple minded people if they wanted, with no big effort.

Its obvious that Nokia should have just added Android to their options of OS'es and continued living of Symbian, while continuing their very promising high end (and low end) GNU/Linux devices. I heard the continued development of Symbian even turned out quite well (Belle etc). But I think all of the companies must have feared GNU/Linux on phones and giving people full freedom. This ofcourse brings me back to the original point you made, that Nokia had to be stopped. The industry must have been happy to help in this considering the threat freedom would bring, rather than the creepy Stasi style phones on the market today. This stuff would pose an even bigger threat to Microsoft, who was happy to become the trojan horse. Microsoft was desperate to expand from PC to phones.

We could have had a NSA free company (Nokia) selling products which empowers the user. That itself in an existential threats to all the others..

Ok.. I know the N9, I have it and never liked it, so I did not use it much. The device is severely restricted/locked. But if development had continued a GNU powered phone would have been inevitable as mobile specifications improved.

Add boring Android alternatives for the more simple minded, and cheap *** low end Linux/something phones along with phasing out Symbian SLOWLY and Nokia would have posed a threat to the whole market for all devices, including laptops etc. Nokia even produced a laptop and could have threatened the whole Microsoft chokehold on the computer market by being a somewhat independent producer of laptops. This as oppos to the decade long anti-competitive Microsoft cooperation with a handful of computer manufacturers.

Just some funny historical afterthoughts written on a device where the keyboard does not take up half the screen space.