ericsson |
2011-03-06 09:46 |
Re: N950 with MeeGo this year, but who trusts Nokia anymore?
Quote:
Originally Posted by wmarone
(Post 960904)
I doubt Microsoft has any true say, and if the post regarding the Developer Edition of MeeGo for the N900 is accurate, with luck the device will be fully functional.
The only two closed blobs left are BME and the SGX drivers. And only Stskeeps has enough insight to say if they have the sources and whether or not Nokia could interfere with them.
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It should be obvious that with the recent news about MeeGo on the N900, the MS-Nokia "marriage" is no such thing. Cooperation on smartphones running WP and the ecosystem - yes, but that's it. Nokia could go Android, and have no saying in the future of the OS or the ecosystem. They went for MS because that would give them much more influence on both, yet they still pay licensing fees like everybody else for the OS.
If MeeGo for devices is like MeeGo for netbooks, there will never be a fully universally out of the box functional distro anywhere, unless someone else provide it. The reason being drivers. Even though closed drivers are readily available from manufacturers, and installing them is easy enough for the average hacker, MeeGo.com will never include closed drivers with the distro. For the common user MeeGo is worthless, it doesn't work out of the box for most hardware, but for the average Linux user there is no problem unless you are an open source nazi (but of course, reinstalling the closed blobs after each little upgrade of the kernel, is a nuisance of epic proportions, more than enough to prevent it from being an everyday OS for anyone). But, the point is that anyone can redistribute MeeGo and include closed source blobs. This will be no different than what Ubuntu or Jolicloud are doing. But who would do it, and for what purpose? A much better business proposal would be to get some OEM build the HW, and sell it with a custom made MeeGo.
This is why Nokias recent (re)involvement with MeeGo is so intriguing. They are not simply adding their "touch" to a fully operational MeeGo, they are developing core phone functionality to make MeeGo fully operational as a phone OS on ARM. That functionality can also be used on Intel. I am sure that when WP is starting to take over from Symbian and things are going well in a year or so, we will start seeing MeeGo devices coming from Nokia.
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