Re: Open source vs confidential products
 

My Levis jeans still have a little place for a pocket watch (right front pocket). Sometimes fashion follows technology, not the other way around.

Re: Open source vs confidential products
 

but only if the format remains constant and the item becomes ubiquitous - like the pocket watch. mobile phones and iPods already influenced apparel (but backpacks, cars and other tech, too), but have not been around long enough to make a lasting and general impact (yet).

Re: Open source vs confidential products
 

So at the end we have users (who want to know and in the meantime are left to speculation and little else) and developers, who are users themselves (and therefore carry the same curiosity) but able to start enjoying and working in the next release without needing a device announced as a condition sine qua non.

Still, you don't see every day companies pointing to open hardware platforms like the Beagle Board or releasing the kernel source code before any related product is out. Users still might prefer 'blurry pictures' but to developers these steps tell and give a lot more. And we do those pre-releases because we care about open source.

Nokia takes different strategies for different products. For instance, there you have the N97 announced last December out of the blue.

And still, who is risking more combining open source approaches AND devices that sell, both together? In addition to Maemo, Nokia is driving the transformation of Qt to the LGPL model and the transformation of Symbian PLC in the Symbian Foundation. Not bad if you are looking at risks already taken.

Re: Open source vs confidential products
 

So you really believe there are lots of third-party developers out there, rolling up their sleeves, developing new OMAP3 apps, and running the Alpha SDK on the BeagleBoard to test them out?

I hope that this "Use the BeagleBoard to develop for Maemo 5" approach is yielding some results with some developers out there. Maybe developers who have access to hardware like HSDPA chipsets and high-definition cameras that can be used with the Alpha SDK.

So far, Fremantle Extras-Devel has some rough NIT ports, but all the things that differentiate the new devices from the current tablets (except OpenGL and my PC's powerful processor) are not available to me to experiment with.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens when the first third-party developers get their hands on the new devices and start making apps that take advantage of the new hardware. What will happen when the developers have a powerful processor, high-definition camera, always-on HSDPA, mobile form factor, and standard Linux available to them?

I'm hopeful!

And I know this thread really isn't about open source software, but I was very pleasantly surprised to find Modest in the Ubuntu repositories. Neat!

Re: Open source vs confidential products
 

No, but it's better than nothing. And who has released better (and still affordable) hackable OMAP3 hardware? Lack of reference hardware is an objective fact that makes many direct comparisons of Maemo with [your x86 Linux distro of choice] not directly applicable.

The Beagle Board is targeted to platform developers anyway. And any little success around the Beagle project encourages similar initiatives for the new reference hardware platforms to come.

As an application developer the lack of this is not a showstopper. You assume there is always data connectivity. You assume the pictures look good. Then you think what would you do with that.

The APIs are there in the alpha SDK and you can experiment with them. If you prefer to wait for a beta SDK with frozen SDK that's fine. If you prefer to wait to a device announcement to see if you like it, that's fine too. If you prefer to wait until having the hardware in your hands that's fine as well of course.

The latter stage is the one most developers take and one strategy could be not to distract anybody from Diablo until Fremantle is ready, well documented and in your hands. Some prefer to wait less in order to have more time to experiment, and these are the ones we want to play with SDK pre-releases, Beagle community support and such.

Me too. :) The assumption is that those that did their homework with the pre-releases will be in good condition to experiment and also deliver software ready for real end users - sooner and better.

Re: Open source vs confidential products
 

I'm preparing for the next device in the best way I can.

I'm writing liqbase to run as well as possible on current hardware.
All the optimizations and tweaks put in now to my app will make it work simply better on the next device.
turning it around to something like GTK (which more people know) if you can optimize and improve the experience here (yes, I know its hard) it will directly relate to an even more improved experience on the next device.

the double bonus here is that people on existing devices get to use your applications as well as they can possibly do, but then on the new device the experience is even better.

A highly optimized application benefits more than just speed, you gain battery life as well.

just bear that in mind ;)

Re: Open source vs confidential products
 

Hi, the posts about N800/770 on Omap3 have been moved to Idle Speculation since this is where they belong. If you feel like continuing that discussion please follow that thread.

Re: Open source vs confidential products
 

I first heard about Maemo, Hildon and Nokia 770 on http://www.gnomedesktop.org many years ago (2005) because I am a GNOME user. Sharp was doing it the wrong way (although I was still into it), smartphones were uncommon, and there was a market for this kind of device.

Also remember it is important to keep in mind the differences between open source, open standard and defacto standard. Sometimes a project can have 1 or more of these characteristics, and some of these definitions can apply on hardware.

Analysis of source code by fanoush stirred up some interesting bits though. This got catched up by some news sites and the ball got rolling. Free publicity!

The problem is rather the communities behind the competing projects you mentioned. They were/are strong. Journalists follow the project. I even see on news sites news about Nokia (and even N97) about which I feel like 'thats only reported because Nokia is market leader'. Same for Microsoft. I tried same with Maemo, but journalists showed little to no interest.

With competitors however...

1) Apple's iPhone. They just use the jailbreaking community as their inspirition for features and quietly catch up with features long present in other devices yet market it as if its something huge. Add to that the rumour community and such. Yet, this jealbreaking community is partly based on open source and quite huge. Apple survives these rumours and such also because of the zealots in the Apple journalist community. Nokia doesn't have these zealots but there is another project which does have them...

2) OpenPandora. What a momentum they had. You call it a failure. OTOH look at the big and active community they've build on a product which has not shipped at all? They keep their community alive with rumours and updates. They interact with the community. Even if they slip some of those announcements it does keep the community alive. OTOH, because they don't have a name to defend yet they don't have to worry about their reputation.

Both of these examples contain a paradox. Sometimes neutral or negative publicity is better than none at all. Sometimes vague details are better than clear details or no details at all.

OpenMoko is a different story. When OpenMoko started LiMo was small, iPhone was non-existant, Android was non-existant and the smartphone market was still maturing. They did too little, too late. Had they invested more resources on their project and delivered on time a product we'd all be running OpenMoko now. Something similar is true for OLPC. When OLPC started there was no netbook market whatsoever. Now, netbooks are the defacto standard laptop-like computer devices for people in Western societies because they're relatively cheap, portable, and do the simple things people want to do on a computer while in contrast the profitable 3rd world hasn't emerged.

Without supporting or analysing the projects and products you mentioned your statement is not valuable nor well argumented.

Its more fair to state the reasoning is part of Nokia's corporate culture to behave like this.

Your example of Nokia N97 counteracts this though but people really want some of the positive aspects of the iPhone in a Nokia product.

We're all Maemo users here, and we run the OS on devices made by Nokia. Not on other devices. So we depend on Nokia's (future) hardware.

Meanwhile I see Nokia experimenting with projects like NFC and those information tags. Because such depends on acceptance of the technology you cannot heavily invest in such, but because also proven technologies (and standards) like 3G and camera are added those are on the safe side of acceptance. Users and developers just want to know what is not on the safe side of acceptance. Because such is not clear, having patience to learn about it isn't easy.

Applications must also be rewritten and/or optimized for Maemo.

If your toolkit and UI are well defined and optimized and you support open standards or defacto standards (such as for example PNG, TCP/IP) you can integrate features in the OS using OO (and libraries). So, for example, you already have a libc and a libpng, but you don't have a UI framework (Hildon, Qt, Cocoa, ...). If you have a good IDE which does the dirty for you in this regard the rest is peanuts.

Simply porting desktop applications to ARM is not the same. In fact, with 24/7 connectivity you can easily run those desktop applications remotely. End of story. Bad performance of a web browser is not the same. Core feature. A web browser not supporting Flash or Java is not the same. Defacto standard. You really must take into account the + and - sides of the hardware to take full use of it, to exploit its + while negating its - (for example convince Youtube to provide alternative for Flash videos).

Maemo defined (open) standards and worked together with FD.o integrating them. As a counter example it is a Linux kernel with an old wireless stack which new applications cannot use.