[maemo-developers] Nokia and MS

[From: Nils Faerber]

Am 14.02.2011 11:54, schrieb Dawid Lorenz:
> On 13 February 2011 22:59, Jeremiah C. Foster
> <jeremiah at jeremiahfoster.com <mailto:jeremiah at jeremiahfoster.com>> wrote:
>     On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 09:01:23PM +0100, Klaus Umbach wrote:
>     > Even if the community supports Maemo/Meego, there will be no new
>     hardware
>     > and one day my n900 will be broken...
>     Nokia claims to be releasing a MeeGo device this year.
> Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if that was *the last* MeeGo device
> from Nokia, too. 

+1

> I am very sceptical about all that and don't really buy that
> "redefintion" of MeeGo within Nokia as a "learning platform for future
> disruptions". Even if it somehow survives within Nokia as a side project
> for geeks, it won't receive serious support, just as Maemo never did.

Well, having been involved in the Maemo development a little I have to
disagree here.
Nokia put very significant effort in Maemo and supporting it. But you
are right to some extend, the effort they put into it did not lead to as
much outside visibility as it would have deserved.

> On top of that, Techcrunch speculates [1] that MeeGo device this year is
> going to be *keyboard-less* N9-01 model, which makes me personally about
> 98.83% less interested in taking it. Having said that, I'd rather back
> the community effort to bring the best MeeGo experience to N900 rather
> than focusing on developing Maemo 5 further (however I appreciate that)
> which is officially dead anyway and its community is only going to
> shrink from now on.

Isn't what you say here effectively the choice between two dead horses?
even if Intel wants to make Atom/Moorestown based mobiles a reality I
have my strong doubts in them. And if I am right they will never produce
a real world Intel based handset which would then, without Nokia, make
MeeGo's mobile UX dispensable - and under cost pressure it will be
canceled, just the same way as they just canceled the netbook UX (with
braindead reasoning but that's another story).

I would then rather choose the horse/platform with most and best
experience (Maemo5) instead of waiting for the other dead horse to grow
beyond infantility.

I think we now have the incredible chance of having a pretty mature
platform (Maemo5) at hand in the open which we, the community, can
further develop and extend without the need for any manufacturer
support. We have devices and we have the platform. What else does it take?

Concerning MeeGo I am extremely sceptical about its further development
and almost as sceptical for Qt's future too. What will happen to Qt if
Nokia reduces its effort into it? Nobody knows. But with GTK+ it is
quite the contrary. GTK+ is a community effort from the early beginning
and has an active community further developing it. Slower than Qt,
admittedly, but it is working out. What happens when large companies
dump gigabytes of sourcecode into the open has been proven a lot of
times already - in 90% of cases the source starts to bit-rot.

So I think we should free as much of Maemo5 as possible(*), put it into
the open and ask Nokia for a guarantee of keeping the internet platforms
(namely *.maemo.org) up and running or at least give enough time to
mirror them to some other hosting service.
And then make Maemo5 *the* true open source mobile platform.
There are other devices evolving which could need it - google for GTA04
for example. And once it has been ported to another device (for the
timebeing I am not aware of any Maemo port to non-Nokia hardware) other
manufacturers will surely jump - not everyone wants Android but it is
currently the most portable and featureful platform. We could change that.


(*) I am unsure how much of Maemo5 Fremantle is still closed. As far as
I know it still contains quite some closed source components. A list of
closed components would be good to have BTW...

> Dawid 'evad' Lorenz * http://dawid.lorenz.co <http://dawid.lorenz.co/>
Cheers
  nils

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