The Symbian Foundation is working to ensure that it provides the shortest path for mobile developers not only to develop applications, but to go from application development to making money on the applications they build. To that end, the foundation will launch an “application inventory” where developers will not be charged a fee or percentage to distribute their applications via the foundation’s channel.
I couldn’t care less about the distribution channel being free or not. The main problem with symbian is that it costs $$$ to package an application so that it even can be installed by others. Sure, free distribution is nice, but it’d be considerably nicer to be able to make something to distribute in the first place!