MeeGo

Mobile World Congress, the largest mobile industry event, takes this week. We'll be using this story to provide live coverage from the event. This will encompass a number of activities including Nokia's media briefing on Sunday (5.30 GMT), Nokia's ... [More] Developer Day (Monday) and a number of keynote speeches from Intel.We will also be bringing you, where possible, a flavour of a number of other activities, keynotes, announcements and launches from MWC 2011. Please note this live coverage event is shared with our sister site All About Symbian. You can also follow MeeGo related announcements and news via our Twitter account (@allaboutmeego). Additional reporting, in separate stories, will cover the news in more detail. <a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=e21b75ae87" _mce_href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=e21b75ae87" >Nokia Events at MWC</a> [Less]

I have been with Maemo since 2007, when I purchased the fabulous N800 Internet Tablet. It stayed with me through Chinook, Diablo and even through the 'Elephanta year'. The N810 started shipping in late 2007 with Chinook. If you recall, a rumoured ... [More] OS named Elephanta and an associated device were dropped after the N810 came out, eating up about a year in the process. Rationale for this was not officially conveyed, but could be assumed to be due to a shift in strategy for Maemo, focussing on mobile phones rather than Internet Tablets. Fine with me at the time - let us regroup and Maemo will come back stronger and more resiliant at the start of the 'new' smartphone era.Nearly 2 years later, Maemo 5 and the N900 entered my gadget bag, I finally had the mobile computer I always wanted. An evolution of the tablet I loved, now with 3G data, cellular phone, hardware keyboard and an OS that rocked. Things were looking good as Maemo was entering Prime Time. That was late 2009, and the promise of Maemo 6 / MeeGo Harmattan has not yet materialized, in spite of official roadmaps presented at Maemo Summit in Amsterdam. In addition, no other devices running Maemo 5 ever surfaced from Nokia, not even the RX-71 mentioned in the source code. Maemo had momentum at that time, and a second product offering would have done the platform wonders. It would have established Maemo as a real OS, attracted more users and developers. And most of all, prevented the product from going stale. February seems like a gear shifting time for Maemo/MeeGo. Last year, we were dropped with the news of the Intel partnership which created MeeGo. Understandably, this caused some shifting around of plans, and delays. But MeeGo Harmattan was supposed to be an instance of MeeGo, and not true MeeGo, an evolution of Maemo 5. From my point of view, an evolutionary jump like that was well within Nokia's capability to execute and deliver by Nokia World. Seems like that OS and device have also been dropped, ala Elephanta. This February 11, a day that will live in infamy, we learned that MeeGo would be relegated to a research project, and not the OS of choice for Nokia's high end devices. A sad day, for sure. Yes, one MeeGo device will be released this year by Nokia, and will hopefully blow us away as the previous Maemo devices did. And again, we are waiting.But, what happened? Where did the corporate vision for Open Source disappear? Why has Maemo/MeeGo floundered within Nokia's walls? Why has the one-two punch of successive product launches not happened in this segment, like competitors have been able to pull off? Why the sudden alienation of users and developers with one fell swoop? Is this a game winning decision or suicide? Where do Maemo enthusiasts go from here? I still like the N900, so one obvious spot to contribute is the Community SSU. That should realistically give longer life to this platform. What about the MeeGo project? Will Nokia be contributing as much 'post 2/11' as they have? Will the Handset UX development slow down now that Nokia's focus has shifted? And lastly, is it time to shift gears ourselves, and move to competing platforms such as the Big 2, or Mr. Jaaksi's Handheld Project? [Less]

The first planned Nokia MeeGo device was rejected by operators because of a flimsy keyboard, according to TechCrunch’s unnamed source. It was originally scheduled for announcement late last year. I’m having a hard time remembering any Nokia ... [More] device with a loose keyboard! Nevertheless, TechCrunch says a keyboard-less MeeGo device could be announced tomorrow at Mobile [...]Continue reading Nokia’s First MeeGo Device Rejected by Operators at The Nokia Blog [Less]

Back in 2005, my small company had an active customer base of more than 15,000 developers using our plugins. These were extensions (Xtras) for Macromedia Director, at the time the number one tool for authoring of CD-ROM and online games published via ... [More] Shockwave. The global Director developers community was composed of 300,000+ professionals, not counting the illegal copies. Sure, Flash (also from Macromedia) was starting to become a powerhouse and was competing strongly with its older brother. But development of both software continued at a healthy pace, and the collaboration between both teams resulted in the opportunity to use Director as a container for Flash media, with a bright outlook for both. Director was still the tool of choice for 3D games, kiosks, CD-ROMS and lots of projects where the ability to extend the environment with C++ code was required, with embedded Flash elements providing the eye candy and an army of designers that were used to the platform. Then Elop was elected CEO of Macromedia. And some months later, the company was sold to Adobe. A nice and stable transition was assured at the time. Director was not to be killed, like Freehand and some others. And it fact it wasn’t. The Director product team had a good channel of communication with the community at the time, and from them we were told that several options were being considered for the future, we just had to wait a bit for the dust to settle. Looking back, it would have been better if the product was sold to another company, or it Adobe management had clearly stated from the start that no significant updates were planned. Instead, Director remained alive at Adobe as a cash cow, with a reduced team that was strangled slowly, always waiting for better news “in the near future”. It was planned obsolescence, and it continues until today: there were sporadic releases (to reap the upgrade fees) and this helped keep some content created in Director still alive. Nowadays the developer community consists mostly of old timers who are maintaining their legacy projects, and struggling against an aging code base that is minimally supported. There were more than 40 companies producing Xtras for Director circa 2002, and from these only 1 or 2 (including ours) is still active. This is mostly out of respect to the existing customers and the investment they have made on the “ecosystem”, as keeping this business alive (support and minimal maintenance costs) is something that has not generated a profit for me in the last two years. So I was not happy to see Elop (after graduating from Adobe and Microsoft, which surely increased his business “skills”) took over the role of Nokia CEO. Oh, oh… spider sense ticked off. Luckily, the other shoe dropped almost as quickly, also in a matter of months, as we all know by now. There is, however, a significant distinction between both scenarios. Director was never free software. There was no option: some from the community even tried the only possible route, which was to acquire the product, but Adobe did not want to let it go, probably out of fear that it will compete strongly again with Flash. So the “strangling” of the community succeeded. Qt, on the other hand, is free software. And KDE has also secured the FreeQt agreement. So, thanks to the L(GPL) and the efforts of the community, there is a way out. I read several blogs asking for restrain and calling a fork “premature”. I respect those opinions, but having lived through a previous elopcalypse, I beg to differ. A small part of me hopes I am wrong, but I believe a fork is not only necessary, but inevitable. And I think KDE is the place where this fork should live, with kdelibs and qt forming an unified platform where truly free (in license, cost and development direction) software can be built. Everyone knows the problems KDE developers and the community have with their patches being integrated in Qt.: with a Qt tree living inside KDE we would be free to apply true open source principles to the development, and let it thrive in the way our software has. I understand Qt Software inside Nokia is implementing open governance and all, and I trust the people in charge of this initiative. But again, their power is limited. I respectfully must say that any initiative led by Nokia or their employees will never be truly open in the sense KDE is. And the axe might fall again in a couple of months, and then again. And the good people will be gone. Qt developers would have migrated to another environments. And the opportunity will be lost. Some will say: but then we will loose the Nokia-sponsored development. This is true. But these are already gone, or will be gone soon, IMHO. Well, we can check this in 2 years, and I will certainly buy a round of beer to everyone at the 2013 Desktop Summit if I am wrong. In fact, I will be happy to do so, and I would be happy to be wrong as it would mean less work for KDE. But I got tired of the “calm down” posts. Putting it in blunt words, we can no longer trust Nokia or depend on it for the core framework KDE needs. Even if most Nokians are very good guys, brilliant engineers and a joy to work with, the new management has shown its true face. Two months ago they were drafting developers in Dublin for Meego, and some people dedicated their time and resources to support the Qt-everywhere promise. This commitment has been broken, and it will not be the first one. Reading the join press release (Elop and Ballmer, come on) feels like an April’s Fool joke, honestly. Just stare at the photo for a while. We can not expect any FLOSS love from these guys, sorry. Like KDE, Meego is hurt, but it can also recover if Qt moves to a truly open upstream repository. Qt, imho, can no longer be controlled by Nokia: development has to happen in the open and be governed like a true community project, like KDE. I can imagine that such a move would make other Meego players happier as well. [Less]

Due to personal issues I have not been able to be online much or work for the past two months. Things are starting to settle now, and while I am still not able to return to a full time work schedule just yet I would like to keep the blog minimally ... [More] updated QtGStreamer had its first stable release! Congratulations to George for taking the flag to the finish line: he is an amazing coder and we are very lucky to have it in the KDE community. It is specially nice for me to read articles like this one from Jonathan, which validates much of the reasoning for QtGStreamer’s design choices (elegant API and no hard dependency on GStreamer libs, to name two core ones.) [Less]

So Nokia has dramatically reduced commitment to MeeGo and has cited,amongst other thinks, MeeGo's inability to deliver a focussed baselinewith sufficient speed. I happen to agree with this failure (and givenNokia was a significant part of ... [More] MeeGo's management I don't thinkthere's a blame issue - more a how do we fix it issue)Assumptions and observations: MeeGo is intended to provide a viable but focussed baseline upon which vendors can build compliant products; not to be an expansive and 'complete' linux distribution. MeeGo has limited dedicated resourcs and focusing them on a reduced MeeGo core will improve quality. MeeGo's main customers are not end-users - they are device vendors : they should be the focus of our core engineering team's design, delivery and QA effort. MeeGo core does not appreciate the difficulties a vendor has in tracking MeeGo; A visibly secure development model is important to the perceived integrity of MeeGo - so visibly restricting write access to the core is important.Proposal: MeeGo Core is confirmed as not being a linux distribution An open MeeGo project (openMeeGo?) is created on the community infrastructure to provide a reference MeeGo distribution Packages not *essential* to the delivery of a compliant MeeGo Core are moved into the community OBS (emacs, vi etc - maybe even the reference UXes) where they are available for use by development teams and end users. "openMeeGo" acts as a reference vendor and provides a forum for reviewing and improving the processes MeeGo uses to communicate releases MeeGo community (which includes core developers) has a significantly lower barrier to entry. [Less]

By now many of you will have read the disappointing news that Nokia has thrown in the towel, having announced a “strategic partnership” with Microsoft to ship new smartphones with Windows Phone 7.Nokia CEO (and former Microsoft Exec) Stephen Elop ... [More] made the announcement at the Nokia Strategy and Financial Briefing in London yesterday.NokiaInitial reactions from many directions seem mostly negative, commenters on Nokia’s official blog are slating the announcement, Nokia workers walked out in protest, Alberto Torres (head of MeeGo at Nokia) has quit, and Nokia’s share price plummeted by more than 13%.The Symbian platform looks pretty much on-life support, and the use of MeeGo is described as a project for “experimental” devices, with Nokia’s R&D budget slashed. There are also rumours that the N9 MeeGo device has been killed.The following quote is taken from the Nokia press release:Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.IntelMeanwhile, Intel is keen to reassure that it’s not “blinking on MeeGo”:While we are disappointed with Nokia’s decision, Intel is not blinking on MeeGo. We remain committed and welcome Nokia’s continued contribution to MeeGo open source.More opinions: Nokia’s towel has been thrown – sad but true, the bomb has hit… [Less]

...now we need to let the dust settle.So, unless you've been living in a cave, you've probably heard about the Nokia news by now. I of course have thoughts and opinions about this, not all of them clear. So I'll just stick with what I think about the ... [More] future for Qt and MeeGo for now.A lot of people around the Qt development community (some users, some contributors, and some Nokians) have been worrying. There have also been a few people asking about forking, and to them, I would say: not yet. Let the dust settle. Right now, Qt themselves don't know exactly what the future holds, but I would expect this to be clarified in the near future. Thiago has also clarified that open governance of Qt is still an ongoing project.I don't personally see too much changing here, because despite news of Symbian's perhaps timely death, MeeGo still needs Qt, and I don't think MeeGo is in any imminent danger. Here's why.MeeGo is not just NokiaIntel is also involved in MeeGo, and in addition to that, there are other partners and OEMs.This will not change.MeeGo is openThis means that anyone who wants to continue the work and contribute, can. There's no barriers, no licensing fees, and no patent worries. This is attractive to hardware manufacturers. Thanks to (trying) to reuse upstream components, it's also a less expensive alternative than Android.This will not change.Nokia did, right at the outset of the announcement say, they are continuing work on itYes, it is true that they also announced that they are reducing their R&D spending on it, but perhaps this isn't such a bad thing. Perhaps lower spending will enable them to spend on what really matters, and focus on getting something out the door.That's not that I think today's news is great, or even good - but I'd like to encourage calmness. Let's all have some time to digest the information and think about what exactly it means.I might write more about this once I've had a chance to collect my own opinions a little more. I'm certainly concerned, and interested, but there is no need to panic. [Less]

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop did not explain what Nokia’s doing with MeeGo and Symbian in his open letter, but they were outlined in a following press release. Symbian becomes a franchise platform, while MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile ... [More] operating system project. Details after the jump. This press release outlines the new strategy and structure. Below [...]Continue reading Nokia Explains Strategy for MeeGo and Symbian After Microsoft Partnership at The Nokia Blog [Less]

“Nokia will adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone strategy,” wrote Stephen Elop in an open letter published at Nokia Conversations on Friday. Specific details of the deal are still being worked out. No mention of MeeGo or Symbian in ... [More] the letter. There’s a quick video announcement of the partnership. Take a look. You can [...]Continue reading Nokia Adopts Windows Phone as Its Primary Smartphone Strategy at The Nokia Blog [Less]