[maemo-community] Harmattan & Maemo Community

[From: Quim Gil]

Hi, I have shared my opinions and all I know and can say at 
http://forum.meego.com/showthread.php?t=2719 - and in other threads even 
before.

Summarizing what I *personally* think as a Maemo & MeeGo community 
member (and as a Harmattan tester too):

- No matter what, the big % of users will go where the big % of users of 
DeviceX can be found, regardless of the URL, name of the OS, packaging 
format and system architecture. As others have said, let's wait to the 
DeviceX launch to discuss this further since now nobody (no-bo-dy) has 
all the pieces needed to bring a good discussion and propose a good 
decision.

- Application development support and discussions for the most part are 
going to be based on Qt. I don't think Qt developers have the luxury to 
split hairs about the postMaemo-preMeeGo discussion while the big wheels 
of iOS, Android and others keep turning. Instead, they should be better 
thinking how to bridge better with Symbian and the other Qt compatible 
desktop and embedded platforms in order to make the most of their work. 
Depending on their motivations and targets each one may find their home 
in the Qt upstream community, Forum Nokia (if you are targeting 
Symbian/Ovi too, AppUp, meego.com (those prioritizing the Linux & open 
source way), etc.

- Platform development discussions will gravitate towards meego.com 
since the interesting pieces of Harmattan are basically common to MeeGo, 
candidates or closed source complements covering features that MeeGo 
vendors will probably need to cook themselves as well.

More *personal* opinions:

- I hope Harmattan is accepted as a target for the meego.com Community 
OBS and apps.meego.com. This was discussed back at the time and is still 
the default assumption afaik but the final decision relies on the 
Community Office or the TSG, so basically Dawn or Imad have the last word.

- Since we are talking about a Nokia product, the default locations for 
official Nokia involvement should be Forum Nokia (mainly for developers) 
and Nokia Support Discussions (mainly for users).

And last but not least

- I keep feeling amazed every time somebody says "Harmattan is not 
MeeGo" based on some architecture differences and then continues 
"Harmattan is Maemo" based on... what? No Fremantle UX, no Hildon and no 
GNOME-style API means a totally different story for most Maemo users and 
developers. Leave alone all the middleware pieces that were rewritten 
from Fremantle to Harmattan and happen to be the same or quite close to 
MeeGo. Sorry, but I don't buy that. If you insist that Harmattan is not 
MeeGo then you need to be consequent and reckon that Harmattan is not 
Maemo either. And once you are there please ask yourself how useful was 
for you and for the [LinuxMobile+Qt] community to stress the exceptions 
instead of the commonalities.

Ville, I don't know what were you motivations stirring this discussion 
now but I still believe we can discuss a lot better when there is a 
device launch, or at least an official technical description of what is 
Harmattan.

--
Quim