[maemo-developers] Curious: Maemo devices other than Nokia?

[From: Ross Burton]

On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 18:44 +0100, Hanno Zulla wrote:
> >> So in other words, despite Maemo being open source and free enough to be
> >> portable to other hardware, there is no other, non-Nokia device you can
> >> develop Maemo applications for, right? I wonder why this is so, since I
> >> like Maemo a lot (from a user's perspective).
> > 
> > Because there is no way to download "maemo" easily and build your own
> > images for a different machine.
> 
> If I am not mistaken, this is not exactly true.
> 
> Maemo (as such) is free enough, some of the apps and drivers that Nokia
> ships with its tablets are not. A competitor interested in building a
> Maemo device should be able to adapt Maemo to its hardware and build
> replacements for the non-free apps.
> 
> I wonder why this hasn't happened, yet.

You need to make a distinction between Maemo and ITOS, which is what
runs on the tablets.  Nokia take Maemo, add a collection of non-free
drivers and software, and using a build system they have not released
produce images.  If the build system were public, then anyone could
produce *Maemo* images for a N810, their laptop, or another PDA.

However it isn't public, so instead you'll find people using existing
distributions (Ubuntu, OpenEmbedded) as a build system to build images
uisng a lot of the Maemo components (DBus, GTK+, Hildon).

Ross
-- 
Ross Burton                                 mail: ross at burtonini.com
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