[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] OS2006 roadmap

[From: Peter Robinson]

> > BTW I was a bit surprised how unmercifully Dr. Ari Jaaksi killed n770's
> > future. It was pretty tough :-) Also it doesn't send good message to
> > users and developers considering the platform. Well, life is hard. Time
> > will tell if it was good move.

Yes, I was too. They're not overly cheap devices and Nokia has been
courting the OSS community with them but then turns around and cuts it
off. Its all very well saying they'll support it the problem I see is
that they're lavishing all the main 3rd party devs with these nice new
devices and suddenly there's no updated versions of apps for the old
IT-2006. I'm yet to actually see abiword for IT-2006. At the very
least you have split dev... those with one OS version but not the
other.

I wouldn't mind so much is the entire platform was open and you could
build and exact copy of the OS and call it something else like RedHat
allows with their RHEL where you can get a 3rd party version called
CentOS (I think) but this is not the case with maemo... there's a
large majority of it that's open but all the DSP audio stuff isn't as
are chunks of other stuff. When it comes down to it its like their no
better than the likes of the graphics card manufacturers or wireless
card devs with their drivers.... almost open but not quite.

A large chunk of the devices look quite similar to me so I don't quite
see the issues here (maybe I'm missing something) but they both run
arm procs with DSPs, have BT (ok one had v1.x and the other v2 but its
the same to the kernel), SD vs MMC (but I think the kernel handles
them the same, a second shouldn't make any diff... one less/more to
deal with) wireless (maybe different), 800x480 screen (possibly diff
vid cards but there's no WM diffs etc to deal with for res). OK one
doesn't have a video cam, but if its not there it can't be used can
it!

I might have missed something but at the moment I just see Nokia
hiding behind a single blog entry.

> At $350 I see it as inexcusable. It's annoying when Linksys stops
> releasing firmware updates for buggy firmware in a $30 router, but it's
> a bit different in this case*. It seems that hardware vendors have no
> problem not caring about (or at least seriously neglecting) existing
> products, from a $30 router to a $2400 laptop (BIOS updates). This may
> be all fine and dandy with someone who has no problem dropping $400 on a
> N800 after they've only had their 770 for 18 months (and it's _great_
> for Nokia as this person will probably blog about how cool it is), but
> some of us want our software to outlive the hardware, not the other way
> around.

At least with a lot of the $30 routers they are using standard
hardware that can usual have custom firmwares that run Linux (like
openwrt) for them to allow further updates that maintain complete or
better functionality if they don't run Linux already.

> Personally, I'm going to seriously look into getting GPE on my 770 and
> partake of the cornucopia of Linux software ready-made from OpenEmbedded
> rather than see yet another disappointment from the Maemo platform

I still prefer maemo but that may well change...

> * Yes, yes. I know there will be more firmware updates, but I'm in
> wait-and-see mode tempered with our existing experience getting updates
> for the 770.

Yes, but that's like apple releasing a new update for a 2 gen old ipod
that fixes one really annoying bug but updates the DRM to the new
version too.

Sorry, bit of a rant, but not overly happy about the news.

Peter