[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] RE: Nokia 770 sources...

[From: Devesh Kothari]

ext Andrew Barr wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-08-28 at 18:47 -0300, Alessandro Ikeuchi wrote:
> > ...
>
> While I certainly don't agree with the angry tone used, I have to say
> Maemo and the Nokia 770 have been disappointing in terms of openness. It
> seems to me that Nokia has opened just enough to get apps ported and/or
> written for the device, which in turn sells more devices, or at least
> that appears to be the plan. Nothing has come of recurring requests for
> information about the Bluetooth hardware (e.g. for headset support), Ogg
> Vorbis support, or Gstreamer/DSP multimedia internals in general. Some
> things that are missing from the Subversion repo don't even make sense,
> e.g. there is no hardware secrets or patents associated with them (at
> least as far as I know) The media player apps come to mind here.
>
What I agree is that we need to strengthen the architecture documents
BTW getting strarted with multimedia development doc was updated
http://maemo.org/platform/docs/multimedia/getting_started.html
(section Plugin development) which describes how to enable  ogg-vorbis
 

> Maemo really isn't open in the sense that we're used to: like a
> traditional Linux distribution. It seems to be more of an SDK plus
> things that were required to be open, e.g. due to licensing terms.
>
I think one of the reason for that could also be attributed that most
general linux distributions are targetted to PC/laptop which have
relatively well defines standardized hardware architecture. What we have
tried to do with maemo is
- provide a common development environment and tools for Nokia 770 and
future devices (SB, rootstraps etc)
- provide (as a priority) to enable application development
- enable experimentation like ability to compile your own kernel, create
your own rootfs and all the benifits that could be leveraged from a
debian based component package management system

Now what we are concentrating on, beside improving the above is to
enable participation and contribution in stages to different parts of
maemo, starting with HAF/Sardine which I hope would extend. The starting
up and adoption barrier for sardine are being recognized, and we are now
trying to make it easy to adopt and use sardine, without sacrificing the
genral device usability. This would enable the patches or feature
implementations by community to be made and tested on the latest svn
codebase, so the component owners can integrate/accept/reject them.
There has been excellent work done for enabling dual boot by Frantisek Dufka
http://maemo.org/maemowiki/BootMenu

which I hope would enable the experimentation atleast in the large area
of HAF/sardine (comprising the majority of the middleware stack like
gtk+, theming, desktop, tasknavigator, control panel, application
installer etc) to happen on MMC based sardine rootfs

Devesh


> This is unfortunate, because it creates a burden on the Nokia employees
> working on this project. They are the only ones who can add many
> requested features or fix bugs, so in many cases people complain to the
> mail list because they cannot take care of things themselves. You don't
> see patch mails on the maemo-* lists. That's to say nothing of ideas
> people have had but been unable to implement--trivial stuff that would
> improve the Maemo environment but may not have been discussed on the ML.
>
> To me, the open-source economy (or whatever) that makes some projects so
> great doesn't work here because the "community" is relegated in large
> part to the role of application developer. The best you can do to
> improve some parts of Maemo is suggest it and hope someone at Nokia
> takes it up.
>
> These are just my impressions from informal observation and occasional
> participation in this endeavor. If you think I'm way off base or crazy
> or something, please feel free to tell me or ignore me.
> --
> Andrew Barr | http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/~andrew/
> <http://www.oakcourt.dyndns.org/%7Eandrew/>
>
> "Buzzword detected (core dumped)"
>   -- seen on linux-kernel at vger.kernel.org
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