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

[From: Mikhail Sobolev]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 06:00:14PM +0000, Ross Burton wrote:
> 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,

Exactly, Ross! I usually visualize relationship between different bits
using the following picture (please use a fixed width font):

  +--------------+----------------+------+
  |              | Maemo SDK      |      |
  +--------------+----+----+------+------+
  |API           |Open|Open| Open |Closed|
  +--------------+----+----+------+------+
  |Implementation|Open|Open|Closed|Closed|
  +--------------+----+----+------+------+
  |                   |  IT OS 200X      |
  +-------------------+------------------+

The part that is covered by "Maemo" (and Maemo SDK) is not enough to
produce a somewhat reasonable system, which:
 1) is bootable
 2) has support for all hardware
 3) has a comparable to IT OS 2008 set of applications

The really "challenging" areas are 2) and 3).  I believe certain work to
make sure that 1) does not have any challenges is planned, but probably
it's up to Quim to confirm. :)

> 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.
The current build system is way too complicated. :(  It requires quite a
few systems to be installed that include web interfaces, databases,
etc...  There is a few really low level things -- detect an build
order, build a single source package, produce image/tarball -- that
could be used independently, however they do have some dependencies on
other bits of infrastructure, so their extraction/polishing requires
certain work [which was not done so far].

--
Misha
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