Time for an open maemo fork?
 

Maemo is very nice.
But what about the future if Nokia goes WP7?

Can the community buy the maemo platform from Nokia?

Or is it time to build an open version of maemo that saves all open source efforts that have been done by the community?

Re: Time for an open maemo fork?
 

Oh dear do you never look on this forum to see what is going on ????.

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=67905&page=177

Re: Time for an open maemo fork?
 

Caramel Popcorn ( Troll Edition ) time! w00t.

Re: Time for an open maemo fork?
 

Also look up Cordia. It's a project to mash up hildon with meego...

Searching is a virtue

Re: Time for an open maemo fork?
 

Yeah! It's about time Maemo went open-source! :)

Re: Time for an open maemo fork?
 

No, it's not for sale.

Like Mer?

Re: Time for an open maemo fork?
 

It wouldn't help you. MeeGo doesn't exist.

Nokia and open source – a trial by fire is a great summary of the situation (other than the author's own "Plan B" in the last few sentences which is somewhat insane).

Andrew Waafa and others who worked with MeeGo on the open-source end reveal things like "Wafaa summarises the problems that developers experienced with Meego as, 'closed-ness, weirdo licensing around trademark and name, and a closed decision making process between Intel and Nokia. Not even partners could get access to decision making. In consequence they did dumb stuff like re-writing the whole networking stack, duplicating as they went. So instead of re-using NetworkManager and improving it, and getting to market fast – they re-wrote, got something that still doesn't work well, failed to push Linux forward, and failed. Repeat that for every technology pick and you get the idea.' "
"ConMan, the replacement for NetworkManager, still lacks many of the basics that users take for granted, such as proper encryption support, Adhoc networking and a usable VPN interface.
"The cynical interpretation among developers was that there was an attitude of: 'Nokia and Intel will always be number one so we have plenty of time – lets get the non-user visible stuff 'perfect'', where the definition of 'perfect' changes every six months.'"

This is what you guys were pinning your hopes on and crying that Elop should just keep plugging away at... "To further confuse the issues, the MeeGo code was a strange amalgamation of Debian, Fedora and openSUSE sources with a melange of unrelated dependencies. 'Because it was such a cluster, with a confusion of old and new libraries, trying to package it was a dependency nightmare,' says Wafaa. 'and some aspects just wouldn't work.'" The article goes on to describe infighting between the Symbian, Maemo, MeeGo, Moblin and Qt camps and how that led to Maemo/MeeGo pretty much starting over every six months with a politically-motivated rewrite. The article makes crystal clear why Elop has zero confidence in Nokia being capable of developing an OS internally anymore. It's also pretty apparent the code is a mess and a design by ever-changing committee. You'd probably better off starting over around another ARM-based Linux port.

Re: Time for an open maemo fork?
 

You think that description only fits Nokia/MeeGo? That's pretty much the default state of any project with unclear ownership. LibreOffice, anyone? And "weirdo licensing around trademark and name" - IceWeasel, right? I am sure even Microsoft had some internal conflicts before ending up dumping Windows Mobile, Kin, and instead concentrating on their copy-and-paste free OS based on an media player firmware. (That's a New And Better type of Free software, invented by iPplejobs. )

Yet, MeeGo does exist. What it is usable for today, and where it will be in half a year, are quite different problems.

Re: Time for an open maemo fork?
 

Actually, that's pulling meaning of from that article that just isn't there. Yes MeeGo wasn't developed well enough and Nokia was internally conflicted; no MeeGo doesn't "not exist", and I'm too lazy to make a long post for once so I'll leave it at that.

As for "fork" - a fork implies splitting off of something. There's no actively developed project to "fork". Maemo development has basically stopped, ignoring the N950 which is technically Maemo 6 rebranded to MeeGo.

In the meantime, the CSSU is already psuhing small open source replacements for closed source stuff out into the system. At this point, there's really no need for a fork I'd say. Every open source replacement for a closed source blob can be pushed into the CSSU, but either way, someone has to write them first, and once they do, the CSSU is effectively a "fork", or rather an addition, to the currently available Maemo 5.

Re: Time for an open maemo fork?
 

Exactly how far are we from getting a normal linux with all the necessary functionalities done right and working on the N900?