Hey Timo et al.,
A Finnish newspaper says that this is due to a law that forbids the use of inside information when buying company shares:
Since Mrs Google isn't able to translate the Finnish article too well, please find an English article about that incident here:
Nevertheless, why didn't he sell the stocks before he applied at Nokia? He says, he's gonna sell his MS stocks and buy Nokia stocks instead. After the Elopocalypse, isn't the set of Nokia stocks a subset MS stocks set anyways?
But there are much more facts that indicate that this Elopocalypse deal is not only a serious setback for free software, but also bad for Nokia on a pure capitalist level, and hence there is something really sticky about this MS-Nokia deal:
* Stephen Elop has performed a similar thing before: Selling out Macromedia to Adobe "from the inside": http://piacentini.blog.br/2011/02/elop-is-after-me/
* Maybe it isn't even a 100% bad idea for Nokia at the moment to announce a WP7 and/or Android phone in addition (why not?). But why this exclusiveness with Microsoft? Why did Nokia put itself completely and utterly at Microsoft’s mercy? They have Qt, they have Symbian, they have MeeGo,...
* The circumstances, under which Stephen Elop was selected in September 2010, are quite a bit mysterious: http://nexus404.com/Blog/2011/01/26/finnish-newspaper-reports-that-american-investors-forced-nokia-to-hire-stephen-elop-nokias-new-ceo-is-the-first-non-finn-in-the-companys-history-but-new-report-claims-that-nokias-hand-was-for/.
* Alberto Mardegan, a Nokia employee, reports that MeeGo is ready and not an R&D project: http://blog.mardy.it/2011/02/committed-to-linux.html. There are more sources indicating a MeeGo device could have been ready and great at the end of 2010 if Elop didn't torpedo it ("setting the platform on fire"): http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/02/nokia-autopsy-on-meego-one-last-look-back-before-we-look-forward-on-the-new-nokia.html.
* Elop has already signed a MS-Nokia deal before, but he was on the other side that time: https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/aug09/08-12pixipr.mspx.
The whole thing really stinks and makes me even sad, I have to admit.
Kind regards, micu