Will MeeGo be as hack friendly?
 

Will MeeGo be as "hackable" as Maemo, will we still have the extras dev to play in? Is it still completely open? Will this turn into a buy everything device?

Re: Will MeeGo be as hack friendly?
 

Yes. Yes. No :)

Re: Will MeeGo be as hack friendly?
 

What do you mean by that? :confused:

Re: Will MeeGo be as hack friendly?
 

Think he means if we'd have to pay for almost every service on the phone. I'm sure some apps will be free like those on OVI store right now. Being a cheapo bugger however, i'm also interested in how 'hackable' Maemo will be as compared to symbian XD

Re: Will MeeGo be as hack friendly?
 

I think the answer is "it depends". MeeGo in itself is open and hackable. However, device vendors could very well take meego and put it on a "TiVoized" device, making it unhackable..

Re: Will MeeGo be as hack friendly?
 

Maemo and Moblin are beloved operating systems for mobile hackers and MeeGo will acquire and expand that heritage.

Even if vendors will be able to limit the openness of their devices, it is expected to have always a choice of fully open MeeGo devices, including devices sold by Nokia.

Re: Will MeeGo be as hack friendly?
 

I might also add (and I think I've said elsewhere) that even if other manufacturers TiVo-ize it, we're still likely better off than most of what's out there now... Anything can in theory be cracked, given enough time, and unless they do something really outrageous to it, once you have full root access, it's still Linux, and you could probably just gut all their junk. For that matter, to my understanding, MeeGo requires (or at least encourages) open source drivers, which makes things a lot easier.
But yeah, Nokia seems pretty committed to Openness themselves, which is awesome.

Re: Will MeeGo be as hack friendly?
 

It's so much hack friendly that hacking is infact the only thing you can do with it, at the time being... :)

Re: Will MeeGo be as hack friendly?
 

Considering the rumors of some of the DRM implementation in Maemo 6/Harmattan, I'm not so sure. Seems like you were going have to choose between having a free open-hackable device and a semi-hackable device (e.g. no kernel modifications if you wanted to keep the access to DRM files).

Re: Will MeeGo be as hack friendly?
 

I wonder how MeeGo is supposed to be able to fulfil that. From speaking with Intel reps one of the key features of meego is security (which defintely is a point where maemo is extremely weak). And in order to protect the users content from malicious apps but also to implement DRM/content protection, they plan to install a crypto/authentication framework.

However, i see two problems in doing that:

a) the GPLv3 (which MeeGo imho uses with gstreamer) prevents you from using encryption to protect your business modell. How is this supposed to work?

b) Of course such a framework limits the hackability. A device cannot be completely open on one side and protect user data as well as multimedia content on the other side.

So will we have to jailbreak the next gen devices? Will the average user still have a method to get root access without removing/lossing vital parts?

This sounds like the same problem Sony solves on the PS3 by removing the "OtherOS" option: You cannot allow people to openly tinker with a unit that carries information that you don't want them to tinker with.