(let's keep this in -developers to avoid cross-posting to -users as well) This mail is about the relationship with Linux mainstream in general, Debian/Ubuntu particularly. Moblin, LiMo, OpenMoko to be considered in this view as well.
The principle is clear: we want to align as much as possible. The implementation is less clear though, due to several factors: - Align to what? There is not a single common reference as for today. - Which technological approaches prevail? There are different technical approaches not always easy to combine or make one prevail. - There is something around organizational aspects that needs to be considered too: how to move platform development processes closer between the Maemo team and whoever we align with. A year ago or so Eero came up with a table comparison showing the essential differences between Maemo, Debian and Ubuntu (where is it? couldn't find it). In this time some things have changed in these 3 projects and perhaps now the differences are less. ext lakestevensdental wrote: > If Nokia is really serious about being a larger player, they ought to > aggressively develop and license the Maemo tablet OS to other > manufacturers so that it has an opportunity to become a dominant player > in the this growing market niche instead of just another somewhat > self-limiting (soon to be abandoned) proprietary sand castle. Nokia is already a large player, knowing perfectly well the licensing model through Symbian/S60. The strategy taken for Maemo is different, promoting the direct collaboration with the relevant upstream projects and going as far as possible with the open source way of working. Maemo is mostly based of open source components. Any manufacturer could take that code base and add their own hardware adaptation and find/develop the set of applications to offer. As for today Nokia is not interested building a business out of that. The Maemo team rather invests the money aligning more and better with the mainstream Linux. > Perhaps the OS might be set up as an independent entity to manage > aggressive development and spread of the platform. Stockholders would > get a break in licensing fees dependent upon their status with Nokia > currently the 100% stocker owner. If PadsRUs has a tablet device that > needs an OS, they could buy X licenses for $Y, or buy stock in the OS > and buy X licenses for less that $Y, related to their stock investment > in the project. That's basically the game of Symbian/S60, and even that is changing to an almost royalty-free approach: http://www.symbianfoundation.org/ We have 0 plans of moving Maemo into that direction. > As it is, with other tablets, like Archos, coming out with their own > OS/Linux variants, it seems the market is going in the direction of > being more and more fractured with lots of reinventing of the same OS > wheels over and over. The market would probably benefit having some > central organization to manage and develop the OS so that hardware folks > could focus more on developing cost effective powerful hardware rather > than both hardware and OS/software. This is what the Symbian folks say as well. ;) But what is the point here in maemo-developers? It is basically the API. Developers would like to have ideally the same API in different platforms so it doesn't matter what components you have underneath, the applications always run. Less work put on boring porting/maintenance and more time available for exciting new development. For Maemo, collaboration upstream is the essential medicine to that pain. This is how Linux projects have been fighting the issues related to diversity (which as such is seen as a good thing). ext Ryan Abel wrote: > Rather than building Maemo up as yet-another-Linux-distro, I'd > _rather_ see Nokia come inline with upstream and essentially ship > Ubuntu or Debian, but with their own differentiation on top. As said above, agreed in the principle and willing to discuss the implementation. > Though, if speculation based on certain rumors is to be believe, this > may actually already be happening. Give it another 6 months and I'm > sure we'll know for sure. What are these rumors? fwiw I would also like to a have a plan in place in 6 months. Those of you with good knowledge of Maemo and involved in other distros can play a role in this process. Feel free moving from rumors and guesses to wiki pages and real discussion. ext Ian wrote: > This makes a lot of sense and has been suggested numerous times on > this list already. Dude, an Ubuntu based maemo (or maemo based ubuntu > ;) would seriously rock. Handing over (collaborating on) the distro > with Ubuntu (which they evidently do very well) would allow Nokia to > concentrate on what it does very well which is shipping extremely well > tested, consumer accessible devices to lots of markets with reduced > economies of scale. Sure. However as for today there is no Ubuntu productized for ARM, so it's not as easy as it might look like for the average Ubuntu enthusiast. The Mojo project (funded by Nokia, btw) is investigating that Ubuntu ARM port. It is probably not very difficult to put a "Maemo Ubuntu Hacker Edition" in place, but the guys in the know think that there is a longer way before shipping commercial products on that basis. Another aspect to be analyzed are the implications of Nokia relying totally on a platform delivered (ultimately) by a private third party. Don't get me wrong, we have good relationship with Mark and the Canonical crew. But what if one day they all go for a new mission in the outer space? Sure, the Ubuntu Foundation has money to keep the project going but Nokia would care about that team, not about the money. "You can always rely back to the open source community", you could say. Sure, and this is what we are doing now. This is not a yes/no answer for Ubuntu (or for Debian, another arguments could be found). Just an attempt to explain why things are not as simple as they look sometimes. > The problem with Hildon is the GTKWindow to HildonWindow substitution > which is the root of what Neil was talking about (this is not a > criticism just an observation). Anything which means my app is not > write once run anywhere is a bug as far as I am concerned Nobody would get any resistance from Nokia for pushing Hildon features to the GTK+ project. On the contrary. For many years Nokia has done its best making GTK+ mobile friendly - more than ever now with Fremantle. -- Quim Gil marketing manager, open source Maemo Software @ Nokia _______________________________________________ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
